What has stood out to you so far, looking at innovative finance from a humanitarian perspective?
Quite a few things, actually. There’s a lot of activity. From our own Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and UN agencies to international NGOs and newer philanthropic non-profits, many institutions are clearly trying to be innovative about how we finance some of the hardest problems facing people and communities. But I don’t think there’s enough conversation across those institutions. A lot of good work is happening in parallel rather than together.
In insurance and risk finance, for instance, UNDP, the World Food Programme, and the Danish Red Cross have all tested disaster risk financing in several contexts. That’s a clear opportunity for collaboration, learning, and scaling.
What should all this activity be aiming for?
For me, the big outcomes are fairly straightforward. Better disaster preparedness, not least through insurance solutions. Improvedlivelihoods: recognising groups in vulnerable situations not simply as recipients of assistance but as agents of economic productivity, and building financing solutions, such as micro-lending facilities, around that. And increased investment in much-needed infrastructure such as health facilities, energy and transport facilitated by blended finance structures. If those are the goals, we should be designing and delivering together much more than we do now.
What’s the biggest obstacle?
Buy-in. There has been real progress, but much of the conversation happens among technical people who can see the value of innovative finance and want to make it happen. I’d like to see more at leadership level, and on the ground among the people closest to the problems.
People in humanitarian organisations are busy responding to emergencies. If you’re dealing with a crisis today, a conversation about financing mechanisms can easily feel like a distraction from what needs solving now.
That’s where I see HIFHUB’s role: making the case to senior leaders and working with programme teams on the ground to explore which financing tools could help solve the real problems they’re facing.
So how does innovative finance win them over?
It can’t just be intellectually interesting to people working in finance, policy or innovation. It must demonstrate real value to the people and organisations delivering humanitarian impact. If it helps them prepare better, respond better, protect livelihoods, build more resilient infrastructure or reach people more effectively – then there’s a reason to engage. If it doesn’t, it risks becoming another layer of conversation around the humanitarian system rather than something that actually changes outcomes.
Is the momentum among humanitarian actors reaching the DFIs and private investors who hold the capital?
That’s less clear to me. Investors consistently point to a lack of investable projects across development and humanitarian contexts, which is true in many instances.
However, there’s another, more nuanced perspective: financing for impact means different things to different actors. DFIs still largely deploy capital in familiar places and in familiar ways: debt, equity, and funds. So, when investors say there aren’t enough investable projects, part of what they mean is that there aren’t enough projects that fit those instruments. That isn’t a criticism. They have mandates and ways of working that exist for good reasons, and many are solving real development problems. But the extent to which they address challenges in humanitarian and fragile settings is limited. That’s not surprising, given the settingshumanitarian actors work in. A shared definition would help ensure we are having the same conversation.
But if the problems we’re trying to address don’t fit their instruments, there’s a risk that we go looking for problems that do. I think it should be the other way round. Start with the humanitarian problem. Understand what’s preventing a better outcome. Then ask whether a financing solution can help and rally the private sector to make it happen.
So how do you go about rallying the investors?
One useful starting point is to look backwards and ask who has financed humanitarian innovation in the past. That could show us where the entry points are, who is already willing to take this kind of risk, and why. The next step would be to bring investors in early and co-create solutions that work for all parties so that we don’t build a product that no one wants to buy. From the earliest stages of designing a programme, dialogue with DFIs, private investors, National Societies, the communities we serve, and technical experts will help build alignment
But there’s also an evidence and communication issue. DFIs and private investors are, fundamentally, looking for a return, and humanitarian interventions are still largely perceived as grant-focused. If we want them to participate at scale, we need to presentcase studies where investing in fragile contexts delivered long-term impact and returns.
You mentioned investors participating at scale. What’s the challenge there?
Aggregation and scale are two words I’ve heard a lot this month. The question is how you take individual interventions or innovations and combine them into something investable, and how you move from interesting one-off examples to mechanisms that can mobilise significant capital. That’s what I joined HIFHUB to work on, and we’re designing a new pipeline accelerator to do just that. But I’m getting ahead of myself – more on that when we’re ready to share the details.
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