Systems Change Approach
Despite significant progress in recent decades, hundreds of millions of people still live precarious lives. This is because many public and market systems operate sub-optimally, produce poor outcomes and fail to provide opportunity for all people. Structural inequalities that benefit a small elite and gender-based discrimination are pervasive.
In response, we help organizations to help make systems more effective, inclusive and just. Our approach draws from experience and evidence and continues to evolve as we learn from our partners and practice. We support Global South-rooted organizations to address the root causes of gender inequality and transform systems to achieve equitable outcomes for millions.Through our Gender Fund, we also focus on institutional change in the fields of law and economics, supporting partners to dismantle barriers and advance women’s and girls’ voice, power, and agency.
Co-Impact’s goal across its funds is to ensure systems that provide the most fundamental services of health, education, and economic opportunity are more just, inclusive, and effective, resulting in improved lives for millions of people across the Global South.
While our work varies across contexts, on the whole, we support program partners to:
- Address power and the political economy: We support partners to understand and address root problems – particularly political and institutional gender constraints, and other socio-contextual factors that underlie exclusion, inequality, low performance, and lack of accountability.
- Focus on key levers that drive change: Systems have multiple challenges; working on all can become unwieldy. Instead of addressing everything, our approach supports partners to identify a few key levers such as policy, laws, mandates, system financial resources, and/or formal and informal incentives that can lead to adoption at scale or institutionalization of key innovations.
- Build effective and powerful coalitions for change: We support partners to undertake power analyses and develop relationships that support a coalition of government (or market) leaders and other actors that is powerful and focused enough to achieve shared outcomes.
- Deepen strategic coherence and strengthen key capabilities: Systems change requires strong organizations with formidable capabilities – we invest in partners to focus on core mission, develop strategic coherence (align organizational resources with purpose), and develop critical capabilities.
- Focus on learning and adaptation: To achieve better results and contribute to field-building. We support a learning orientation across our program partners and work to generate and disseminate a body of rigorous evidence to serve as a global resource about what works at scale.
