Dear friends,
National, Finance, Knowledge. These are the three pillars of the Global Alliance — and this month’s edition offers a glimpse of how each one is taking shape on the ground.
The idea behind the pillars is straightforward. The National Pillar is about political will translated into action: governments putting forward concrete programmes, identifying gaps, and inviting partners to help fill them. The Finance Pillar is about aligning resources — bilateral, multilateral, philanthropic, climate — behind those country-led plans. And the Knowledge Pillar is about making sure the evidence, the tools, and the lessons from what works are accessible to everyone who needs them. None of these pillars works in isolation. But each requires dedicated attention, and this edition highlights meaningful progress under all three.
On the knowledge front, we inaugurated the Alliance’s regional office in Brasília earlier this month, hosted by IPEA. The office is more than a regional hub for Latin America and the Caribbean. It is the home of the Alliance’s Policy Basket curation effort — the systematic work of documenting what has actually worked, at scale, in reducing hunger and poverty. Together with the World Bank, Brazil’s Ministry of Development and Social Assistance, IPC-Id, and other partners, the team there is also building a knowledge platform designed to go beyond general guidance and into the nuts and bolts of programme implementation: how governments have structured procurement, managed targeting, handled payroll systems, and navigated the political economy of scaling up. That kind of operational knowledge is often the missing piece. We intend to make it available.
On the national side, the Alliance’s portfolio of countries continues to grow. Benin, Ethiopia, Haiti, Kenya, and Rwanda are all at various stages of programme development, and new countries are coming forward. We have launched a dedicated Country Programme Support page on our website, where you can follow the status of each country programme (those whose plans have reached validation stage, anyway), the partners involved, and the stages of planning and implementation. The match-making and implementation planning underway — from school meals in Benin to livestock productivity in Ethiopia to water systems in Kenyan schools — are an early attempt at showing how this model can work. But it only works if partners show up, stay engaged, and coordinate around the government’s plan rather than their own.
On finance, let me be candid. The environment is difficult. ODA budgets are being cut by several key donors, and domestic budgets are constrained in many of the implementing countries. And even among committed Alliance members, aligning resources behind a single country strategy is inherently hard. Each partner has its own approach, its own budget cycle, its own business model and approval requirements. All of them committed, when joining the Alliance, to make their best efforts to align resources behind country strategies. But finding the practical pathway from that commitment to actual coordinated financing remains one of our biggest challenges.
During the Spring Meetings in Washington next month, we will convene some key financial actors to begin a conversation about alternatives — how to crowd in financing across different sources, how to apply resources more strategically, and how to build bridges between bilateral aid, multilateral development banks, philanthropic capital, and climate finance. This is not the conclusion of anything. It is the beginning of a conversation. But it is the right conversation to be having, and the Spring Meetings — with the launch of the Alliance’s DC hub at the World Bank — are the right place to start it.
The work ahead is real and complex. But so is the commitment that keeps bringing governments and partners to the table. That is what we are building from.
Renato D. Godinho
Director, Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty
Support Mechanism
