Partnerships that Redefine Impact in Asia

In conversation with Arnaud Quemin, Mercy Corps Vice President for Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe Regions

The Power of Unlikely Alliances

From Nepal’s Himalayan highlands to Java’s coastal mangroves, riverine and coastal communities in Asia face diverse and complex challenges. Climate change has intensified natural hazards and disasters including flooding, heat, and landslides. Crops and goods are washed or burned away, affecting people’s capacity to build and grow income generating activities and enterprises.

Arnaud Quemin, Mercy Corps’ Vice President for Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe Regions, has seen the fundamental transformation in Eurasia’s development and investment landscape over nine years of serving in senior leadership positions for the organization. He firmly believes that now is the time for bridging diverse sectors and stakeholders, building resilient and mutually beneficial partnerships centered around flexibility and innovative forward-thinking. The scale of the challenges faced requires a correspondingly scaled, expeditious and holistic response.

Mercy Corps, an international Non-Governmental Organization with a mission to help people build more secure, productive, and just communities, collaborates with local governments, the private sector, and philanthropic organizations within the Zurich Climate Resilience Alliance to strengthen community resilience to flooding and climate change through climate-adapted livelihoods. The private sector provides linkages and skills to grow resilient value chains and livelihoods (through public-private partnerships), while policy development and implementation support to Governments ensures sustainability and scalability. This snapshot highlights a wider truth: Asia’s most urgent challenges – climate change, inequality, and human development – cannot be solved in isolation.

Arnaud believes that the partnerships which once proved so unlikely are now indispensable. Broad stakeholder alliances and coalitions, which bring expertise and resources from government, the private sector, and philanthropists, have incredible potential to co-create impact which is both scalable and sustainable.

Why Partnerships Matter Now

In his nine-year tenure as a senior leader at Mercy Corps, Arnaud has witnessed numerous changes in Asia’s development landscape. Traditional development funding – grant-based instruments from global north governments – has seen a steady reduction in recent years as acute crises across the world divert attention. Meanwhile, as Asia develops, long-standing challenges become more complex to address, with solutions requiring expertise and resources from across multiple sectors.

Different actors and stakeholders have unique and complementary roles to play – philanthropists can provide catalytic capital which delivers results in defined timeframes. The private sector picks up on pilot interventions, bringing innovation and capacity to global markets. Governments offer national reach, response capacities, and policy continuity, as well as providing central disaster preparedness and response frameworks and investments in critical infrastructure – a platform of stability for individuals and communities to build on.

Public-private partnerships operate very differently to the traditional grant-funded development model. Naturally, returns on investment are a consideration – pilots are by their nature risky with no guarantee of success. Organizations like Mercy Corps add value – and certainty – by capitalizing on long-term experience and relationships with communities and systems, fostering trust and buy-in for complex initiatives to catalyze impact.

Arnaud recognizes the hesitancy from several angles. Concerns that multi-stakeholder partnerships risk bureaucracy, inefficiency, and top-heaviness are common. But these challenges are not the rule – there are many examples of complex, rich, lean partnerships such as ZCRA that deliver results at scale. This partnership approach requires a shift in mindset, where value is generated not from costs – but the level of energy each stakeholder is willing to invest in the initiative. When these partnerships are aligned around a common, overarching goal – climate resilience, financing, or entrepreneurship development – inputs rapidly index with outputs.

Building Ecosystems for Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurship is one dimension where cross-sectoral partnerships lay the groundwork for communities and individuals to thrive. Mercy Corps has a long history of supporting entrepreneurs and Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) through a Market System Development approach, strengthening the ecosystem connecting entrepreneurs and businesses to capital, financing, and business services.

Importantly, Mercy Corps does not replicate these systems – they leverage the preexisting opportunities provided by local and regional private investors, accelerators, and government initiatives. In Indonesia, funding from the Starbucks Foundation is enhancing access to economic opportunities for women coffee farmers, bundled with digital financing and business development services provided in collaboration with the Farmer Support Centre. While in Central Asia, Mercy Corps’ MicroMentor Social Enterprise works with the European Reconstruction and Development Bank (EBRD) to link entrepreneurs with a global mentor pool to improve business outcomes for a traditionally under-resourced MSME community.

Supported markets do not only create competition, but also cooperation – in Myanmar, a Mercy Corps program promoted fly farms as an income-generating fish food for coastal communities in the Ayeyarwady Delta. Arnaud noted that individuals trained under a pilot scheme organically shared the knowledge and skills with friends and relatives in neighboring communities, explaining to Mercy Corps staff that this would make fish farming a more prosperous and efficient industry. Rather than creating monopolies, communities worked together to operate at – and achieve – a scale which Mercy Corps – or any lone actor – could not achieve individually.

Unlocking Impactful Climate Investments through Partnership

Alongside individual – and systemic – entrepreneurial development, climate financing is a growth area where collaboration multiplies impact. Climate financing represents a win-win scenario, where businesses grow and remain sustainably viable in the face of a changing global climate – governments, for their part, can define sustainability as a criterion within national investment frameworks, avoiding social harm and negative economic development.

Substantial opportunities for investment and impact exist in Asia but are hampered by an adversity to climactic risks. Multi-stakeholder partnerships can and should take advantage of emerging trends and practices, such as blended financing and de-risking mechanisms. Once technical expertise, and critical investments which generate proofs-of-concept, are added to public-private partnerships, stakeholders have the necessary ingredients to build something powerful and impactful. Mercy Corps in Indonesia is piloting index-based crop insurance for coffee farmers in Sulawesi, serving as a model for scalability in access to risk financing across the wider Asia Region.

The costs of inaction are greater than those of taking action. We live in a time of incredible changes in costs and access to energy and communication, with opportunities to provide access to sustainable solutions more accessible than ever. Hence, it is no longer a mercantile, predatory investment that prevails and brings returns – any business should see that their long-term interest is in supporting and working with prosperous, resilient communities. To turn down socially positive investments at this point, considering the inevitable impact climate change will have on us all, is a purely own-goal. The opportunity lies in mutually beneficial profits at the point where public and private interests inevitably converge.

Mercy Corps Advantage – the Bridge that Connects

Mercy Corps is meeting the future head on. As a stakeholder in Asian development for the last 35 years, the organization’s trust and credibility with different stakeholders, such as governments, corporates, philanthropists, family offices, UHNWIs, and start-ups, provides Mercy Corps the role of a convener or bridge between actors who, until now, may rarely collaborate.

The value of a bridge is not where it starts or ends – rather, in connecting two points and two directions. Their work across diverse geographies, who often face similar underlying challenges, helps to identify new solutions, alignments, and patterns which would not be possible without a global footprint. By virtue of connecting two people from different places, experience has demonstrated successful generation of novel ideas and perspectives, that reinforce each other in unexpected ways.

Whether connecting private sector actors and communities to establish circular economies in Myanmar’s animal feed value chain; linking people and policy to strengthen disaster preparedness in Indonesia and Nepal; or building market connections between dairy producers and government schools in Kyrgyzstan; Mercy Corps is drawing lessons from the never-ending flow of ideas which circulate between individuals, governments, business sectors, and philanthropists – an idea which is becoming increasingly essential to the mission at Mercy Corps.

Conclusion: Building the Future Together

Asia has always been a crossroads of economic, social, and cultural movement and trade, placing it firmly in the center of a now globalized network. There is excitement around this moment – Singapore, one of the richest countries per capita in the world and a historical hub of entrepreneurship and trade, is well placed to take advantage of the enormous economic opportunity in being an economic bridge between the established West and the rapidly expanding East.

At a time when Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) work is under attack elsewhere, Asia still holds the view that it is possible for business to be sustainable, socially responsible, and profitable at the same time. Mercy Corps firmly believes that some of the opportunities cited above can place Asian businesses and philanthropists as an example for the rest of the world to see that anti-ESG rhetoric impedes both social and economic growth and development.

There is no way to meet the greatest challenges of our generation without working together. Now is the time for forward thinking, innovation, courage and action.

Emma Rios Sanchez Dawa Dem Roselle Agner Ade Soekadis Mercy Corps

His case for cross-sector partnerships appears in our guide to philanthropy in Singapore.