Giving Compass' Take:

• Skoll Foundation profiles Fundación Capital, a social enterprise based in Colombia that has scaled its efforts to help people in poverty through a strategic government partnership.

• What can other organizations learn from this example? One main thing is that patience is a virtue: Change will not happen overnight, and political changes can often disrupt progress.

• Here's more about the implications for impact investing in Latin America.


Partnering with governments is an increasingly popular pathway for social entrepreneurs seeking to scale their impact. But as the new Scaling Pathways report shows, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. It depends on the partnership goals, from getting government to simply grant permissions, to full adoption of the intervention, or even policy change. While different strategies may be used at different times, it’s important to have a clear understanding of the end goal. This way social enterprises can decide on the best-suited approach.

Approaches to engaging governments can fall on a spectrum from developing, piloting, and refining a model first (i.e., Build First) to co-creating the model or intervention with government partners from the start (i.e., Build Together). Each has its pros and cons. Employing a strong “build together” approach, the social enterprise Fundación Capital believes strongly in the power of partnering with government to improve the economic lives of millions living in poverty. We recently caught up with Ana Pantelic, Chief Strategy Officer for Fundación Capital, to hear more about what they have learned in this process.

"Embedding financial or productive inclusion initiatives into social policy is no easy task, and it requires us as social entrepreneurs to take the time to really understand government needs, and then work with them to co-create solutions that fit into their own strategies," says Pantelic. "To that end, we are on the farther end of that partnership spectrum, seeking adoption and policy change. In fact, this has been our approach since day one. For a lean social enterprise like ours, co-creation toward adoption and policy change is crucial to achieving our social mission."

Read the full article about Fundación Capital's government partnership by Elyssa Lewis at Skoll Foundation.