Global Partnerships Conference: What does the sector want to see?

Ahead of the Global Partnerships Conference (19-20 May), co-hosted in London by the FCDO, the South African government, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation and British International Investment, Bond, our members and partner networks have highlighted what they would consider successful outcomes.

Sustainable finance

With donors backsliding on their ODA commitments and using aid as a tool for domestic interests, conversations about how to target shrinking ODA are more important than ever, and must be a key focus at the conference. The private sector plays an important role in sustainable development, but it cannot replace ODA, especially in areas like conflict prevention, crisis response and basic social services in lowest-income countries. Even with proposals to leverage greater private capital using ODA, private finance is unlikely to emerge on the scale expected.

We hope the conference enables a candid conversation about what funding tools are best suited to specific contexts. It should offer space for nuanced and meaningful discussions on reforms to the international financial system, which are urgently needed and would give Majority World countries the fiscal and policy space to reach their own development goals. Low- and middle-income countries have been clear in calling for economic system reform to effectively address challenges such as unsustainable debt, corporate tax avoidance, illicit financial flows and unfair trade rules as part of the debate about the future of development cooperation. We hope this conference inspires bolder action on this urgent agenda.

Shifting the power and locally led

The conference has made shifting the power one of its key themes, and this is something we welcome. However, we hope the UK government uses the conference as a stepping stone to turn rhetoric into reality and outline how it will become more locally led. We want to hear its strategy for this and what it plans to do to implement it.  We are keen to hear from traditional donor governments, including the UK, about their plans to set out clear mechanisms to shift decision-making authority, resources and accountability toward local and community-led actors, alongside recognition that risk is a necessary element of social change.  

Technology and AI

We welcome the focus on the role technology and AI has in the future of development co-operation; they are powerful tools for development but only when approached with clear recognition of their risks. This includes acknowledging AI’s potential negative impacts, including climate costs, data privacy concerns, online gender-based violence, the dissemination of misinformation and the reinforcement of political, racial and algorithmic biases. Any use of AI in development must be underpinned by strong governance frameworks and uphold intellectual property rights and universal human rights. Technology and AI potentials must be envisaged in ways that support equitable and sustainable development and actively reduce global dependencies and discrimination.

Humanitarian

This section is written by Bond’s Humanitarian Working Group

We see the conference as a critical moment to turn longstanding commitments into practical action in humanitarian contexts across the conference’s three main themes.

1. Innovative finance: Disaster-risk financing needs to be scaled and adapted for fragile and conflict-affected settings, recognising the essential role of ODA and catalytic grants in these contexts. There needs to be  stronger coordination across instruments and meaningful roles for local actors who are often first responders. The UK’s leadership on pre-arranged financing is welcome, but now it needs to reach the hardest contexts.
2. Technology and AI: The humanitarian sector urgently needs shared AI governance frameworks, grounded in community participation, not just organisational compliance. We’re calling for a sector-wide ‘right to know’ principle so that people affected by crisis understand when and how AI shapes decisions about their lives. There must be donor mandates for disclosure of AI usage in programme design, monitoring and evaluation and for investment in AI assurance capacity in the Global South.
3. Local leadership: Rhetoric needs to turn into diversifying funding channels, harmonising due diligence across donors, ensuring adequate indirect cost recovery for local partners, and co-designing risk frameworks rather than transferring risk downward. Local actors must be at the table when priorities are set – not just when funding is distributed. Donors must invest in trust-based partnerships and long-term relationships with local actors, not just crisis-response subcontracting. We hope the conference commitments translate into practical deliverables that local actors can engage with directly.

Health

This section is written by Action for Global Health

The conference coincides with the 79th World Health Assembly in Geneva, where world leaders will gather to discuss the future of the global health architecture and health financing.  The UK is seeking to connect these discussions and agree core principles to take into these dialogues, amid a context of hugely reduced ODA budgets and US withdrawal from the World Health Organization. 

We believe there are three core opportunities:

1. Meaningfully involve and listen to civil society and impacted communities on how the future architecture can deliver equitable health outcomes. This thinking is already happening – the HEAR-CSO Consortium has gathered the views of nearly 140 civil society groups and impacted communities across seven regions globally. 
2. Build strong, resilient health systems grounded in partnership. Jacqueline Bamfo from the Ghanaian Doctors and Dentists Association UK highlights how diaspora health professional networks provide a fantastic blueprint for “how modern health partnerships must function, shifting from top-down, aid-dependent models to approaches led and shaped locally”. 
3. Be clear on the UK’s role and goals. The UK’s Global Health Framework expired in 2025, and there is currently no strategy guiding the UK’s work in global health. It is critical that the UK clearly defines its role and ambitions – through a comprehensive, cross-government Global Health Strategy – to improve health for all.

Gender

This section is written by the Gender & Development Network (GADN)

Escalating attacks against the rights of women and girls in all their diversity globally and the increasing rollback of gender equality require urgent action at the conference. It presents a key opportunity for the FCDO to deliver on its commitment to ‘women and girls’ as a cross-departmental priority. In addition to concrete actions on gender-based violence, the conference should also promote gender equality across all the other areas of discussion, reflecting the UK government’s promise of an “ambitious gender mainstreaming approach”. 

This should be reflected in the consistent use of gender equality and rights language at the conference, including in the compact, speeches and all outcome documents, recognising the structural barriers faced by women and girls in all their diversity across the life course. Coherent gender mainstreaming will also require meaningful consultation and inclusion of women’s rights organisations and feminist movements from across the Global South, which will provide indispensable policy expertise. 

Discussions of private finance mobilisation necessitate an evidence-based approach that recognises the potential dangers and limitations of private investment in promoting gender equality. Similarly, discussions on fiscal resilience should recognise fiscal instability and austerity as key drivers of gender inequality, given that women and girls are more dependent on public services and are expected to fill the austerity-induced gaps left in public provision. 

We urge greater visibility of gender mainstreaming. Failure to do so will contradict the government’s own commitments to gender equality and undermine the conference’s overall impact.

Read more about GADN’s asks for the conference in this open letter to the Foreign Secretary.

Disability

This section is written by Bond’s Disability and Development Working Group

The conference comes at a pivotal moment and offers a chance to reset development cooperation around genuine partnership and inclusion. The UK has a strong record of including people with disabilities in its development programmes and policies, yet experience shows that without explicit attention and recognition to people furthest behind, development agendas risk repeating past shortcomings. This is particularly critical given that, of the 1.3 billion people worldwide living with a significant disability, 80% are in the Global South.

The conference is a vital opportunity to reassert UK leadership by embedding specific commitments to reaching those furthest behind across all development priorities. This means reiterating past promises to ensure accessibility, equitable participation and meaningful engagement of people with disabilities and their representative organisations throughout every stage of the process.

Across thematic areas, inclusion – and disability inclusion specifically – must be central, and reflected in the compact. This means committing to tackling health inequities through inclusive healthcare; ensuring climate action and finance mechanisms meaningfully involve marginalised groups; embedding disability inclusion across development finance reforms; shaping AI that reduces rather than reinforces exclusion, and addressing the heightened risks of violence faced by women and girls with disabilities.

Only by shifting voice and power to those most marginalised and placing inclusion at the heart of the conference and beyond can future development cooperation truly ‘leave no one behind’.

Climate

This section is written by Climate Action Network UK

The consequences of failing to pursue sustainable development are clearly seen in the climate change and biodiversity loss crises. Both are the predictable outcomes of economic benefits being prioritised over the social and environmental needs of everyone, and the impacts are rolling back decades of hard-fought-for development gains and devastating the lives and livelihoods of communities around the world.

The conference must be a moment to recognise and address this, ending the dominance of economic decision-making and foregrounding the environmental and social safeguards necessary in every single proposal and initiative. Otherwise, the conference outcomes will simply not be in the best interests of people and the nature and climate on which all our lives depend.

Coming just weeks after the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels, the conference must advance discussions to break free of the barriers across debt, finance, tax and trade policies which are trapping countries in unsustainable development pathways.

While name checked, it is disappointing how little sustainable development and addressing climate change and nature loss actually features in the conference’s content.

Across the three main themes, sustainable finance must include commitments to:

• end financing for fossil fuels and scale-up financing for renewables.
• end fossil fuel subsidies and redirect the public finance to climate action.
• cancel debt and provide non-debt creating climate finance.
• fairly tax fossil fuel profits and the largest polluters.

Technology and AI commitments must recognise and address the rapidly growing negative environmental and social consequences of input demands, particularly from datacentres, and place as strong a focus on regulation and safeguards on the input side as on the end-user side.

Shifting the power must mean supporting low- and middle-income countries’ calls to reform international debt, finance, tax and trade policies which keeps unsustainable development locked in.

We cannot achieve thriving communities while continuing to cause damage. The Global Partnerships Conference must not ignore this and must deliver a strong message that the future of development must be sustainable, with people, nature and climate at its heart.