Blog – CFS53 SIDE EVENT: Blended Finance and Impact Measurement in Agrifood Systems

The side event brought together donors, practitioners and development finance experts to explore how blended finance can more effectively mobilize capital for agrifood systems transformation and how its impact can be measured consistently.

Attended by around 70 participants worldwide, the event was opened by Maurizio Navarra, Senior Partnership Officer and GDPRD Secretariat Coordinator, who introduced the GDPRD’s Thematic Working Group on Sustainable/Blended Finance. He recalled that the group was established out of a shared recognition among donors that, while blended finance remains a powerful tool, the methods and systems to measure its effectiveness vary widely among the donors who engage. The newly developed Catalytic Capital Framework aims to provide a common language for assessing additionality and impact, ultimately leading to greater transparency, comparability and efficiency in donor financing.

Tuleen Alkhoffash, Senior Private Sector Officer at IFAD, set the scene by outlining IFAD’s role and experience in deploying innovative and blended finance instruments. She highlighted both the progress and persistent challenges in mobilizing private capital for agrifood systems.

She noted that, despite growing attention to blended finance, ODA resources are tightening and attracting private investors to rural and agrifood sectors remains difficult due to perceived high risk and low returns. Alkhoffash emphasized that concessional capital must be used strategically and selectively, focusing on markets and segments where the private sector is least active but the development payoff is greatest.

She also stressed the need to build a pipeline of investable opportunities, forge stronger partnerships between public and private actors, and generate clearer evidence of what works. The Framework, she said, represents a vital step toward bridging that evidence gap and helping donors and investors identify interventions that are truly additional and impactful.

Eda Dokle, Coordinator of the Agri-SME Learning Collective and Data & Learning Manager at CSAF, presented the Catalytic Capital Framework developed under the GDPRD’s Working Group, with support from Canada, Norway, Switzerland, the UK, and the US.

She explained that while blended finance is expanding rapidly, approaches to assessing additionality (what concessional capital enables that would not otherwise happen) and impact (the real benefits for SMEs, farmers and workers) remain fragmented. The Framework seeks to harmonize these definitions and promote standardized measurement across donor portfolios.

The first round of testing, conducted from December 2024 to April 2025 across 13 initiatives, revealed wide variation in how donors define and report impact. This reinforced the need for common metrics, shared taxonomies, and aggregated benchmarking to ensure accountability and comparability. Download Eda’s presentation.

Peter Beez (SDC) emphasized that standardized approaches would simplify coordination, avoid duplication, and reduce transaction costs. For Switzerland, catalytic finance must be additional, attributable and impactful—not only mobilizing funds but improving the livelihoods of farmers and consumers.

Anders Aabo (Norad) presented FASA (Financing for Agri-SMEs in Africa), a multi-donor initiative by Norway, the UK, the US, and Korea that uses catalytic capital to invest in agri-SME funds while generating data on the effectiveness of concessional finance. FASA, he noted, could serve as a testing ground for the Framework.

Radio Save (FCDO) highlighted the importance of linking financial performance to real-world development outcomes such as farmer income, jobs and climate resilience. He warned that without measurable impact, blended finance risks losing donor credibility.

Songbae Lee (former USAID) underscored that data generated through blended finance must serve as a public good, available to all actors. He called for more donors to join, fund, and test the Framework so that scarce concessional resources are used more strategically.

Lee emphasized that collective leadership and trust are essential for this initiative to succeed. The Catalytic Capital Framework represents not an endpoint but the beginning of a joint learning journey toward harmonized, transparent and evidence-based blended finance.

The event concluded with consensus on three priorities:

1. Standardization of definitions and metrics;
2. Collaboration to build shared data and learning systems; and
3. Commitment to piloting and scaling the Framework.

The Donor Platform was widely recognized as a trusted convener to sustain this momentum—building transparency, benchmarks, and collective action to make blended finance for agrifood systems more catalytic, impactful and coherent.