Country platforms for transformational impact at scale: A proposal

The challenge: Scaling beyond projects

Countries face growing pressure to transform their economies to meet development priorities amid rapid technological change, persistent development challenges, and mounting climate risks. This includes adapting to slow-onset changes such as rising temperatures and water stress, while also preparing for more frequent and severe natural disasters. Meeting these challenges requires substantial investment, but also stronger institutions and better coordination to ensure that investment supports sustained economic and social transformation.

The scale of investment required makes how resources are organized and deployed as important as how much is mobilized. Governments need to align public and private investment around long-term national priorities, while building the institutions, incentives, and implementation capacity needed to sustain change over time. Pressure on external development and climate finance adds to this challenge, increasing the importance of mobilizing and aligning domestic and international resources effectively.

Traditional development models built around short-term, externally financed projects are poorly suited to this task. Individual projects may deliver important results, but without stronger country-level institutions and financing arrangements, they can remain disconnected from the broader policy, institutional, and economic changes needed for lasting impact.

Country platforms—nationally led mechanisms that align public, private, and international stakeholders around shared development or climate goals—have gained prominence as a response to this challenge across health, education, nutrition, and climate action. At the same time, international funders and country-level partners have their sights set on scaling impact with increased ambition. Yet country platforms and scaling approaches remain largely disconnected in practice.

Country platforms have rarely achieved transformational impact at scale because they are created to answer the urgency of the moment, without the incentives and alignment that longer-term scaling requires. Conversely, scaling stalls where there is no country-level institutional infrastructure for goal setting and coordination. Each needs the other.  

Moreover, currently country platforms and investment programs operate in a transactional rather than transformational mode: funder-driven, multiple one-off projects delivered through short-term programs, with no pathway to development impact at the scale of the problem. For transformational impact at scale, country platforms have to change from externally driven project coordination and aid mobilization mechanisms into nationally led ones that organize stakeholders, finance, evidence, incentives, and institutional capacity to build the required enabling conditions of policies, institutions, and political viability. This shifts a platform’s purpose from aligning actors around individual projects and fundraising to answering what needs to grow, what systemic conditions must change, which country-level agents will sustain and expand the programs, and how progress continues beyond any single funding cycle.

To address this challenge, practitioners and experts from government, development finance, philanthropy, civil society, and other sectors convened through the 2026 17 Rooms initiative to identify the conditions needed for country platforms to support transformational scaling. The group focused on practical ways to assess whether platforms are developing the institutions, incentives, financing, and capacity needed to sustain and expand progress over time. Four action priorities have been identified for the international community to move from transactional to transformational development action:

• More country ownership with persistent national government commitment to transformational change, stronger capacity and inclusive governance of country platforms, and readiness to commit to long-term programmatic approaches;
• Greater readiness among funders—especially the large multilateral and bilateral official funders—and clearer incentives for their frontline staff to align support with long-term scaling pathways and transformational country platforms;
• More recognition by all partners and stakeholders that transformational scaling and country platforms need to be fostered systematically with adequate resources and capacity, a realistic time frame, an inclusive mindset, and effective monitoring, learning, and adaptation; and
• Better frameworks, tools, and resources to help domestic and international stakeholders at country level move from a transactional to a transformational approach in their projects, programs, and coordination efforts.

Taken together, these priorities point to the need for sustained changes in institutions, incentives, and ways of working—both within countries and among external funders—supported by clear benchmarks for tracking progress over time.

What this shift means in health and climate

Health and climate provide two important test cases for this shift, as both sectors are seeing growing efforts to organize financing and implementation around country-led platforms. In climate, country platforms have gained momentum as mechanisms for translating national climate plans into investment, including through the launch of the Country Platforms Hub and the announcement of 14 new national platforms at the 2025 U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP30). In health, country platforms and National Health Compacts are similarly aiming to bring governments and development partners around country-led reform agendas, financing priorities, and longer-term health system goals. These developments provide a practical basis for considering what a shift from project-based coordination toward longer-term national systems requires.

In health, this means reversing the prevailing “projectization” of health funding focused on narrow solutions, encouraging governments to focus on access, data quality, workforce development, domestic financing, and delivery systems rather than donor requirements. In climate, it means supporting government-led management of energy transition, adaptation, resilience, competitiveness, and investment sequencing rather than project packaging alone.

In both sectors, governments must look beyond short-term economic and political gain to a longer-term vision of national progress. External funders must trade off speed against durability, attribution against shared ownership, project accountability against system readiness, and funder control against government leadership. These choices require different questions about how development action is designed, financed, and assessed.

The experiences of Peru and Kenya help show what this progression can look like in practice, from coordination tied largely to projects and external finance toward more durable national institutions and commitments.

In Peru, a Global Fund-style coordination mechanism was described as an obligation to access money: people sat around the table because the project required it. By contrast, Peru’s Roundtable for Poverty Reduction emerged from a national political crisis, brought together political parties, government, civil society, academia, and religious leaders, and agreed on long-term priorities around mothers and children. It helped create continuity across governments and contributed to progress on reducing child mortality, maternal mortality, and chronic malnutrition.

In Kenya, an initial attempt at health financing reform (SHI, a social health insurance program) failed amid disagreements among government, employers, and the private sector, prompting a Ministerial Stakeholder Forum to work through system-level reforms. The forum proved durable across successive political cycles, and a more recent county-level initiative has evolved from a transactional, time-bound intervention toward greater government ownership, domestic resource allocation, and longer-term planning. This consensus laid a firm foundation for the current health care financing reforms stipulated in the new health financing acts and the creation of an SHI scheme under the Social Health Authority (SHA).

Both examples suggest that durable coordination is built over time, as national ownership, institutional arrangements, and community commitments deepen. This points to the need to support that development more deliberately.

The proposed solution

A country platform should mature over time from coordinating actors toward an effective pursuit of transformational impact at scale. We propose a maturity model and diagnostic checklist to help governments and funders assess whether a platform is evolving from transactional donor coordination into a government-led instrument for managing transformational scale, and what trade-offs that evolution requires.

The solution consists of three components:

a. A phased maturity model

In this approach, one moves from (1) transactional funding and coordination of one-off interventions among a small number of actors, to (2) strategic problem-solving and crowding in of stakeholders and partners, to (3) collaboration and funding for transformational scaling (Table 2).

Why do we need a phased approach?

• Country stakeholders and funders are often not ready for a transformational approach, tending to focus on short-term responses to long-term development and climate challenges.
• Phasing builds the capacity and incentives for collaborative transformational action and demonstrates its value.
• Forging a shared understanding of the development problem, of appropriate interventions, and of needed transformational actions takes time and learning by doing.
• The right approach will look different in each country and must be developed iteratively.

b. A diagnostic checklist for transformational country platform readiness and design

In judging readiness to move from one stage to the next, a diagnostic checklist of key elements would be usable by governments, other domestic stakeholders, external funders (MDBs, bilaterals, foundations, INGOs), and global country platform hubs. Box 1 outlines a possible structure. To make it a tool for pragmatic assessment, stage-gating criteria will need to be developed for measuring progress and identifying stronger and lagging areas of engagement.

c. Test, adapt, and roll out the maturity model and diagnostic tool

The maturity model and diagnostic checklist need to be tested and adapted in different country contexts (including fragile and conflict-affected states), sectors, and thematic areas. Tailored versions can then be rolled out for practical use at country level, for training government officials, country stakeholders, and external funder staff, and for academic teaching.

Constraints and trade-offs in developing, testing, and implementing a maturity approach

Governments face incentives to secure financing quickly and to focus on short-term economic and political benefits. Ministries and public agencies may protect mandates, budgets, and authority rather than contribute to a transformational country platform. Private sector actors may disengage if the platform does not offer a clear value proposition. Frontline implementers judged on immediate delivery have little reason to invest in long-term scaling work. These factors help explain why platforms remain transactional, and a phased approach must recognize and address them.

Funders’ policies and incentives also shape whether platforms develop more durable approaches. They are often rewarded for visible, short-term project results rather than long-term system change, and their financing windows, reporting cycles, attribution requirements, and risk appetites can push governments toward quick access to external finance rather than the harder work of changing domestic systems, budgets, and accountability arrangements. For a platform to mature, funders must surface, discuss, and change the incentives they control, and be honest about the trade-offs: less direct attribution, slower timelines, more political negotiation, and more shared control in exchange for greater durability and impact.

There are many challenges and tensions to an effective development and implementation of country platforms in support of transformational scaling:

• Broad versus narrow scope? The former makes for more complexity and challenges to consensus building, the latter for more fragmentation and stovepiping.
• How to balance immediate delivery and long-term transformation?
• How to sustain national ownership across political cycles and changes in national and ministerial leadership?
• How to incentivize the private sector and nongovernmental organizations to participate effectively?
• How to get external funders to internalize the transformational scaling agenda?
• How to create the conditions for transformational change and scaling in fragile and conflict-affected states?

A maturity-based approach does not resolve these tensions or answer how key actors can be motivated to pursue long-term development goals collaboratively. But it offers a framework, process, and tool to identify the main challenges and bottlenecks and to encourage stakeholders to search constructively for lasting solutions.

What are the concrete next steps and who will take them?

Development and climate experts working on the future of development should consider refining the three-stage model and validating its relevance for different country and sectoral contexts. This may include refining the diagnostic tool needed to establish progress criteria for each dimension. Ideally, this work should connect with existing country platform hubs (e.g., for climate change, and for health) to explore their interest and mobilize in-country stakeholders and external funders to test the model. An  independent technical entity familiar with scaling and country platform practices (or a consortium of such entities), advised by experienced country and external funder representatives, could support this process. The Scaling Community of Practice is well positioned to do so.  

The model and tool then need to be tested and adapted in different country and sectoral contexts, in close cooperation with—and preferably for—an existing or newly initiated country platform. Testing could be led by one or, better yet, a consortium of funder organizations (e.g., the World Bank, other MDBs, foundations, vertical and innovation funds, and INGOs) leading the dialogue with other partners, or initiated by the country platform hubs for climate and health. Each test will require a small team of scaling and country platform experts augmented by country and sector experts, and the effort will need to be planned, monitored, and evaluated across countries and sectors. Country platform hubs can again play a useful role as secretariats in this process.

Throughout, the technical team in charge of the initiative should disseminate progress and lessons to invite feedback on the design and usefulness of the model and tool—improving both while increasing the familiarity of the development and climate community with them.

Ultimately, the model and checklist, adapted in light of experience in different country and sector contexts, should be applied wherever scaling with country platforms can support transformational development and climate action. The institutional and funding mechanisms to sustain that practice must be developed as part of the earlier steps.