The Global Partnerships Conference (GPC) which takes place in London this May (2026), under the theme – Common Challenges, Collective Action, is co-hosted by the UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper, the Republic of South Africa, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), and British International Investment (BII). It is a necessary milestone against a backdrop of global turmoil. OECD data confirms that global Official Development Assistance (ODA) fell by 23.1% in 2025, the largest annual contraction on record, erasing a decade of growth. The five largest DAC donors — Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and France — accounted for 95.7% of the 2025 ODA decline. Notably, 2025 is the first year on record in which all five simultaneously reduced their contributions.
Competition for what remains is intensifying, while blended finance — the instrument most frequently offered as the alternative — closed just 123 deals globally in 2024. The arithmetic is unforgiving. TheGlobal Partnerships Conference arrives not a moment too soon. The UK’s deliberate pivot from donor to investor logic — “thinking like an investor, not a donor,” in the FCDO’s own framing — is the right instinct at the right time. Leslie Maasdorp of British International Investment calls this a “new era of development which prioritises investment, economic partnerships and sustainable and green growth.” For capital mobilisers, that language is welcome. It signals that the instruments on offer are diversifying: blended structures, outcomes-based financing, risk-sharing guarantees, domestic capital market development. In a world of shrinking grants, these matter.
But the conference must confront what the financing architecture consistently evades. For-instance, access to blended finance is not simply a supply-side problem. Convergence’s Joan Larrea has warned that scaling it “will require more than select large transactions and moderate market growth.” The deeper constraint is on the demand side: organisations whose propositions are strong and whose communities need capital are not easily navigating the documentation, ESG frameworks, and financial structures that investors require. As AfDB Vice-President Solomon Quaynor put it, “achieving sustainable development requires substantial financial investments which will not come without trust, transparency, and accountability.”
ESG is not retreating everywhere — it is hardening as a gateway condition; however much political noise surrounds it. Investors continue to require it. Blended finance structures are built around it. Ignoring it is not a strategy; it is an exclusion.
The GPC can be genuinely transformative if it moves beyond coalition-building into commitments: coordinated capacity-building programmes that bring origination-stage organisations in the Global South to investor-readiness, so that when the capital door opens, they are already standing in the room.
