Opinion: 3 key strategies for solving global problems

What’s working to solve the world’s most pressing problems? This question lies at the heart of the Solutions Insights Lab, an initiative of the Solutions Journalism Network. We believe that by listening deeply, insights and trends can be surfaced that will speed innovation and support changemakers to create, implement, and scale solutions.

In partnership with the Skoll Foundation, we spoke to over 200 global social entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds. The conversations followed a solutions journalism approach, which focuses on highlighting responses to a problem, examining evidence of impact, mining for teachable lessons, and exploring limitations.

In this piece, we focus on three key themes that the research revealed: Building partnerships, co-designing solutions with locals, and scaling culturally specific solutions.

1. Building partnerships

We often think about partnerships as collaborations between mission-aligned NGOs within an ecosystem. Overwhelmingly, interviewees said that regardless of the breadth of your network, you need a partnership with the government to make change that can be sustained at scale. This is especially true if you’re trying to work with hard-to-reach populations or cover a broad geographic scope.  

Government partnerships can be complicated. There can be resistance on both ends. Social change organizations may resist working with a government that is known to be corrupt or autocratic. And people who pride themselves on being responsive and nimble will find it frustrating working with often slow and hierarchical bureaucracies.

Despite those real concerns, interviewees found champions across different agencies and levels of government. They learned how to make government officials comfortable adopting policy or program ideas. They studied existing government plans and priorities and aligned their programs to meet those needs. Finally, they built capacity and buy-in within governments so that leaders could take full ownership of the work over time. 

One example is Breakthrough. In the rural northern Indian village of Devipur, the organization worked to make higher education more accessible for girls and to change beliefs that lead to gender-based violence. In Devipur, no girl had attended college. With no transport linking the village to the nearest college, parents feared for their daughter’s safety. However, the girls who had gone through Breakthrough’s school programs were determined to attend college, and they pushed for change.

In response, Breakthrough’s President and CEO at that time, Sohini Bhattacharya, facilitated a meeting between the girls and the sarpanch, the elected village head and liaison to regional government officials. That led to a meeting with officials in the government’s transport agency to request a bus link. After negotiation and a promise of minimum usage, the transport officials agreed. More than a dozen girls have since gone on to college.

Breakthrough provided states and localities a road map to increase girls’ access to quality education, a priority set out in India’s 2020 National Education Policy. By working with local village leaders to improve school infrastructure and create an environment where girls can attend and persist in school, Breakthrough supported the government’s delivery of its own policy goals.

2. Co-creating solutions with locals

It’s conventional wisdom that effective and sustained social change requires drawing on the local expertise of people most impacted by the problem and supporting the agency of individuals and communities. Our interviewees said this wasn’t enough. There’s a fundamental difference between building a general sense of agency as part of a program and actually supporting local design and ownership of the program, they said. The latter is far more likely to be sustainable.

Tostan offers nonformal education programs to communities across Africa so that they can lead their own development. A cornerstone of its work, Tostan’s Community Empowerment Program, is a three-year, nonformal education process that cultivates leadership through Community Management Committees, or CMCs — local bodies composed of 17 village members who set priorities and work with their communities to pursue development objectives.

In Tostan’s experience, by the time the program ends, CMCs have taken full ownership. NGOs come and go, but local leadership sustains the program. Sumai Jallow, a CMC member in Kuntaur Wharf town village in the Central River Region of Gambia, said Tostan’s programs helped village leaders improve human rights for women and girls, reducing domestic violence and child marriage.

3. Scaling culturally specific solutions

Effective solutions are context-specific. Problems always exist within specific historical, social, and cultural contexts, so solutions must take these contexts into account. Similarly, we know that for some systems-change work, it’s vital to shift societal narratives. Cultural narratives and beliefs can hold harmful systems in place. One strategy is to have a universal template that can be adjusted and adapted — based on the advice of local experts — for new contexts.

Faith Mwangi-Powell, CEO of Girls Not Brides, works in countries around the world to end child marriage. She spoke about how the organization relies on a universal theory of change and partnership strategy that sets out the best pathways to end child marriage and serves as a unifier across all of the work that they do. The organization’s path toward the end goal may differ across contexts. In Uganda, working with the government might be the easier pathway, whereas in Bangladesh, it might be working with local communities or with religious leaders. However, the theory of change provides a guiding vision and points to specific practices to reach the shared goal.

Moving forward

Designing interviews around the solutions journalism framework allowed us to surface one of the most surprising findings to come out of these interviews: The similarity of strategies being used across incredibly varied contexts.

Interviewees are working in diverse cultures and geographies, within different political systems, and on all different kinds of problems. They are turning battlefields into farmland in Afghanistan, equipping female entrepreneurs in rural Guatemala with the skills to bring renewable energy to their villages, and ensuring patients in countries from Bangladesh to Zimbabwe have consistent access to life-saving oxygen.

The more people we talked to, the more we saw that their strategies had a lot in common.

Changemakers care about forming and leveraging strategic partnerships, they are figuring out how to involve locals as co-designers and co-implementers of solutions, and they are conscious of being agile and flexible enough to adapt to new contexts. There is a treasure trove of wisdom here about the nuts and bolts of social innovation. Sharing this knowledge is an important step to building an ecosystem where changemakers break out of silos and come together to solve the daunting challenges facing communities around the world.

Learn more about what’s working in solving the world’s most pressing issues: https://whatsworkingsolutions.org/