In recognition of the interconnectedness of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) with broader social, health and economic challenges, in 2021, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) initiated a four-pillared DEI framework to enhance its efforts at achieving transformational outcomes for long-term and sustainable change. A significant part of these efforts is the rollout of several partner diversification initiatives to ensure that its partners are better positioned to reflect the realities and diversity of the communities they serve across the globe.
These initiatives (mainly around partner surveys and data projects) have accelerated at varied levels and depths across the foundation’s Program Strategy Teams (PSTs) with the general intent of flipping traditional relationships and power dynamics. Despite these initial steps, there has been little coordination of the foundation’s efforts bringing to bear the compelling need to understand the variations in perspectives, positions, and progress of PSTs relating to their partner diversification journey. This will enable the foundation to strategically design and advance towards its equitable partnership goals.
Given this background and reflecting on initial case studies by the Partnership Strengthening and Diversity (PS&D) Demonstration Team, the foundation commissioned an MLE project to serve as a long-term research and learning effort to answer the question of how diversification of partnerships leads to greater impact.
The overarching objective for this project is to enable divisions, teams, and individual POs, among others, to increase the impact of their strategies and grant making.
Objective 1:
Explore partnership strengthening and diversification approaches that funders and philanthropic actors in the sector have undertaken and where the foundation’s PS&D efforts fit within this external landscape of relevant interventions.
Objective 2:
Identify impact pathways of the foundation’s different PD interventions across its PSTs, divisions, and priority regions and identify implications for future PD efforts. More specifically, as part of this objective, we aim to codify the extent and types of impact, over time, resulting from different teams’ distinct approaches to PD.
Objective 3:
Identify internal and external factors enabling and inhibiting the intended outcomes and results of partner diversification efforts on the individual partners and extended ecosystem of partners and beneficiaries.
Objective 4:
Identify, understand, and communicate the linkages/relationships between partner organizational strengthening efforts and partner diversification.
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