MODERNIZING DEVELOPMENT

Institutional Innovation
Institutions built for a different era

Public institutions were built for a different time: organized by sectors, guided by fixed mandates, and measured by short-term outputs. But today’s challenges, from climate to jobs, inequality and public trust, do not fit neatly within those boundaries. Institutional innovation means changing how institutions work, so they can collaborate across sectors, work with new partners, and act over longer time horizons as part of their normal way of operating.

Digital Transformation
Digital as a tool for structural change

Governments spend over US$800 billion a year on technology, yet most public-sector digital projects miss their goals. The problem is rarely the technology. It is that digital is often bolted onto institutions whose funding rules, data silos and procurement systems were not built for it. In systems and portfolio work, digital is not an IT upgrade. It is a tool for shifting access, data and decision-making, helping institutions reframe problems and open up possibilities that did not exist before.

System Finance
Shifting capital from treating symptoms to systems that produce them

Development finance remains structured transaction by transaction. Development banks earn fees on individual transactions. Fund managers are assessed on quarterly returns. Donor systems remain project-based. Public institutions are measured by disbursement rates rather than coherence. Each institution is rational on its own terms but collective result is fragmentation.

Capital treats symptoms rather than the systems that produce them - through portfolio work we change this logic. Systems finance does not ask whether a single investment performs well within a diversified portfolio. It asks whether a portfolio of connected interventions, sequenced across sectors and capital types, can shift how an entire system works.

Dynamic Capabilities
The capacity to adapt when circumstances change

Public institutions are built for stability, and rewarded for it. Plans are approved, budgets are fixed, and changing course mid-cycle reads as a failure to deliver rather than a sensible response to new information. So when circumstances shift, most systems slow down. Systems and Portfolio work builds the opposite capacity: to notice early signals, adjust as you learn, and keep moving without waiting for the next plan or funding cycle.

Local Assets
Starting with what you have

Every country already has the assets transformation depends on: local knowledge, trusted relationships, community networks, and people who know how to get things done. The problem is that the development system is often wired to overlook them. Funding rewards what is new and brandable, procurement favours imported expertise, and what already works locally goes uncounted because no instrument is designed to see it. Portfolio work inverts that logic: it starts from what is already there and builds with it, rather than importing solutions and building around them.

Portfolios for System Change
How portfolios drive lasting change

Most development still runs as separate programmes that rarely speak to each other. Each can perform well against its own indicators while the system they share moves nowhere . Portfolios are the connective layer: the mechanism that turns the other capabilities of the transformation stack into coherent action, with interventions that reinforce one another and adapt together as conditions evolve. The shift is from coordination as an afterthought to coherence as the design, duplication then becomes leverage, and isolated wins become system change.

Powered by Politics and Power
Working with political reality, not around it

Development often treats politics as a risk to manage or a constraint to work around. It is neither. Change needs political will, and political will has to be built, fed and protected as conditions shift. System and Portfolio work takes politics seriously: building coalitions, shaping narratives, reading windows of opportunity, and giving decision-makers credible options when they can act. The deeper the change, the more this becomes the work, not the backdrop to it.

Powered by Development Intelligence (Human + Digital)
Intelligence that reaches decision-makers in time & formats that matter

We tend to over-invest in content but under-invest in decision capability. We build skills that optimise for information but not for navigating incentives and institutional dynamics. AI perpetuates information overload if it is not methodically translated into decision support. Through portfolio work, we connect data, insights, and the lived experience of citizens into intelligence that helps bridge implementation with policy advice, and provides sharper and faster decision support.