Devex Opinion: To scale nutrition outcomes, blend finance and perspectives
9 April 2025By Peter Beez, Greg S. Garrett, Lucas Tschan
To unlock enough investment for nutrition globally, public, private, and nonprofit sectors must collaborate to scale impact.
Imagine a world where generating impact is good business, and financing solutions at scale is possible. This is what we want to achieve with blended finance in the nutrition space.
As official development assistance shrinks and the funding gap to develop healthier food systems in low- and middle-income countries persists, there is an urgent need to mobilize billions of dollars from private sources to support nutrition outcomes. Blended finance is a major part of the solution.
Blended finance can be defined simply as the use of catalytic capital from public or philanthropic sources to increase private sector investment in sustainable development. However, it goes far beyond just finance. Blended finance initiatives are also about “blending perspectives” and approaches.
To optimize blended finance and scale it up for nutrition, we must operate in the sweet spot between the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. We provide the perspectives of these three sectors and how they can work together to scale up blended finance for nutrition.