Executive Summary
Now is the time to seize the opportunity of ensuring everyone can access nutritious, affordable food within planetary boundaries by driving innovation, solutions and collective action. Addressing Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2 – Zero Hunger will require the efforts of everyone – farmers, agrifood businesses, governments, international organizations, NGOs, consumers and more – across the whole agrifood system, including what we produce, process and consume.
Globally, the private sector has the potential to play a central role in driving the transformation of the global agrifood system. The compendium's cases demonstrate corporate willingness to co-create and co-fund multi-stakeholder solutions that drive agri-food system resilience, productivity and sustainability. Some cases embed regenerative and inclusive principles directly into investment models, while others deliver pre-competitive platforms built with governments, NGOs and development finance partners. And some cases highlight how corporations can support new industries, from early-stage R&D to commercialization.
Leveraging multi-stakeholder collaboration and layering different sources and types of capital call for high levels of transparency and accountability. The private sector's role in supporting the emergence of co-investment models closely links with the reshaping of corporate accountability mechanisms, with companies encouraging standardized monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) metrics and tools to validate sustainability claims. Robust corporate performance and accountability frameworks can create feedback loops that enable investment decisions that meet both financial and environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals. They also have the potential to generate further public incentives from the public sector.
In parallel, many of the co-investment cases in this compendium highlight barriers to scale – such as the lack of a clear business case and investor caution when faced with financial risk and regulatory fragmentation or uncertainty. Unsurprisingly, they repeatedly mention activities that develop a stable, supported business enabling environment as successes and requirements. Yet the examples also clearly demonstrate that blended finance solutions and multi-stakeholder collaboration can be effective and are already unlocking new opportunities to be scaled up for agrifood system transformation.
Systemic Barriers
The cases in the compendium face many common systemic barriers
Investor risk caution and market perceptions
A major barrier is the cautious stance of investors. Perceptions of high risk, uncertain returns and long investment horizons limit capital flow to early-stage or innovative agrifood ventures.
Shrinking public development assistance and the need for catalytic capital
Declining official development assistance and grant resources pressure blended finance models to prove financial sustainability while still serving development impact.
Financing gaps for early-stage companies and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)
Smaller agribusinesses and SMEs struggle when trying to access affordable, patient or tailored finance.
Major bottlenecks created by fragmented policy and regulatory environments
A lack of coordination in national policies and of enabling frameworks are major barriers.
Agricultural subsidies
While subsidies often aim to enhance the quality of life of producers, they often finance practices that lead to social, economic and environmental harm.
Operational constraints and weak local value chains
High-value processing is still concentrated in the Global North. Market size and capacity limitations in aggregators or SMEs reduce efficiency and scale, as do challenges in technology adoption.
Governance and stakeholder coordination
Setting up effective governance structures remains a challenge.
Systemic solutions
The cases presented in the compendium provide inspiring, concrete examples of systemic solutions:
How stakeholders use capital
The strategic use of concessional, catalytic and development capital to de-risk private investment is critical to getting money to flow to food system transformation.
Longer-term investment horizons and adaptive structures
Facilities structured over 7+ years enable iterative learning and alignment between investor return expectations and impact timelines. These are essential in complex agricultural and food systems.
Standardized impact measurement
Embedding activities like nutrition scoring and climate impact metrics and frameworks build investor confidence, improve transparency and link financing and measurable SDG outcomes.
Multi-stakeholder collaboration
Collaboration among all stakeholders creates ecosystem synergy. Layering debt, equity, grants and technical support services in the same communities maximizes scale and sustainability, while reducing risk.
Policy alignment and enabling regulatory environments
Strong governance structures encourage government participation and supportive regulatory frameworks, subsidies and tax incentives.
Alignment with nature, climate and equity goals
Repurposing resources in line with sustainability objectives can release significant finance to close the funding gap while reducing economic activity that harms nature.
Digital and innovative models
Leveraging digital platforms and adopting climate-smart technologies helps improve operational efficiency, market reach and data-driven decision-making. A digital ecosystem approach can facilitate value-added products and services on the backbone of digital access.
