With Major Backing From MacKenzie Scott, Co-Impact Targets Baked-in Global Gender Inequality

Co-Impact has set its sights on improving health, education and economic outcomes for hundreds of millions across the Global South, and forever changing the way the world sees women at all levels of society. But progress means beating back bias so deeply ingrained that it’s invisible, a stasis the philanthropic collaborative’s founder and CEO Olivia Leland has described as “baked-in.”

So what’s the recipe for breaking down the barriers that keep people on the margins — and especially women — from achieving real and lasting parity? To Co-Impact, it starts by challenging the hidden norms, skewed policies and outdated government processes that often hide in plain sight. Next, attract pooled resources that can be deployed flexibly, over the long haul. Then add vast networks that are designed to last, and involve all comers in the business of breaking down barriers that hold people back.

That approach has drawn some major philanthropic backers, including, you guessed it, two big donations from none other than MacKenzie Scott, totaling $125 million. In fact, in 2021, Co-Impact received the largest single donation Scott has reported to date. The collaborative’s long-term, flexible grantmaking and focus on gender equity no doubt appealed to the mega-donor and her team.

Here are a few things to know about Co-Impact’s work since it launched in 2017, and the funds it’s created to help build just and inclusive systems — including recent grants made totaling $161 million.

Global and grassroots

Co-Impact’s mission is global, working in Africa, Asia and Latin America, through a diverse slate of teams spanning eight countries. The organization’s goals are squarely aimed at supporting large-scale systems change. But its funding approach is decidedly local. It typically supports grassroots organizations and locally led partners with lived expertise. Multiyear grants are the norm.

Co-Impact’s collaborative model creates space for sharing ideas and actions, seeking to give members of its donor community an equal voice. Its board of directors includes Mexican Human Rights activist Laura Garcia and representatives from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Delta Philanthropies and the Centre for Social Impact and Philanthropy (CSIP) at India’s Ashoka University.

But partners coalesce around Co-Impact’s work from all levels of society, including government, community groups, researchers, funders and the private sector. Together, they consider the ideas of who holds power, identify decision-makers, and decide how the status quo can change.

Partners in progress

Between its launch in 2017 and 2020, Co-Impact has raised a reported $500 million in seed funding. Initial core partners include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Indian-American billionaire Romesh Wadhani and Kathy Wadhani, the Rockefeller Foundation, Jeff Skoll, and Richard Chandler, whose foundation works to build economic prosperity in the Global South.

It has also drawn serious backing from MacKenzie Scott. Supporting Co-Impact was one of her first moves, and she’s only added to that. In July of 2020, a $50 million investment was part of the tranche organized around the idea of driving change. In June 2021, Co-Impact’s Gender Fund was one of the 286 equity-oriented force multipliers she supported in the “Seeding by Ceding” tranche, with a $75 million gift. To date, that is Scott’s largest single donation in any category. At currently reported levels, 1 in 5 dollars raised by Co-Impact have come from Scott.

Foundational Fund

Co-Impact has created two funds since its founding, a Foundational Fund in 2019, and a Gender Fund in 2022.

The Foundational Fund addressed the desire to surge funding at the right time and scale to meet core challenges and effect systems change across three focus areas: health, education and economic opportunity.

By “core challenges,” it means the underlying government and market forces that keep people living on the margins. By “scale,” it means grants of between $5 million and $20 million. And by “timing,” it means over a span of five to six years.

Forty funders representing 16 countries have come together through the fund, to consider transformative initiatives aiming to impact a million people or more, address gender equity and inclusion, and apply evidence-based research to solving specific problems. Fund partners include the IKEA Foundation, the ELMA Foundation and LGT Venture Philanthropy. Upon its launch in 2019, funding totaled $80 million.

Gender Fund

In March 2022, Co-Impact announced the development of its second fund — a Gender Fund that plans to raise and deploy $1 billion over the next decade to help systems lift women’s leadership and social agency across the Global South.

Once again, investments are meant to be large, long-term and flexible in nature. Seventy-five percent of the country-level grants are intended to reach women-led organizations in six to eight countries across the Global South.

Gates, Scott and the Rockefeller Foundation came in as lead donors. Champion donors include Cartier Philanthropy, Estee Lauder Companies Charitable Foundation and Roshni Nadar Malhotra. Delta Philanthropies and Higherlife Foundation cofounder Tsitsi Masiyiwa, the BeeNev Kambasha Foundation, and the SHE Project Zimbabwe specifically support its Africa Gender Initiative.

Impacting 300 million

In December, Co-Impact funds awarded more than $161 million to 34 “locally rooted” organizations in countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America. This time, the goal grew to improving the lives of more than 300 million people.

Investments had a throughline focus on the root causes of structural discrimination, especially those that build women’s leadership capacity. Grantees were largely women-led organizations with strong ties to their local communities, to meet a clear intention to decolonize development.

Ninety-five million came from the Foundational Fund to support eight long-term systems change initiatives within its “core foundation blocks”: health, education and economic opportunity.

Sixty-six million was granted through the Gender Fund to support 24 initiatives that buck gender-based barriers. In addition to the “core three” goals, work expanded to include sexual violence and maintaining bodily autonomy. Female empowerment and leadership programs also got a boost, like efforts to develop new generations of women lawyers and public advocates.

The remaining $1.6 million funded research to generate the evidence decision-makers need to support women’s leadership and equality goals.

Work on the ground includes one-to-one mentorships as well as big thinking.

CAMFED International, a recipient of a foundational funds systems grant, is using the support to develop a “Learner Guide” model that creates local female-to-female mentorships for marginalized secondary school girls in Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. And it’s also digging deep on transformational change.

Leadership said the partnership “is helping us sharpen our systems thinking, especially in exploring how we can best contribute, collaborate and engage with others to improve educational outcomes for the most marginalized girls, ensuring that more girls complete school and are supported to become independent and influential.”

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