Across some of the world’s most fragile contexts—from DR Congo and South Sudan to Somalia, Afghanistan, and Sudan—millions of people still face preventable suffering because humanitarian systems remain trapped in short-term, grant-dependent cycles. Even highly effective interventions such as acute malnutrition treatment, safe assisted deliveries, and outbreak prevention continue to shrink or close altogether when annual funding gaps emerge. This is not because we don’t know what works. It is because the financing architecture is broken.

This year, Common Good Marketplace (CGM) and our Supplier Medair were selected to join the IMD Driving Innovative Finance for Impact (DIFI) program—a global platform bringing together 40+ institutions, 80 practitioners, and 16 high-potential projects across 20+ countries to fundamentally redesign how humanitarian and climate-resilience outcomes are funded. DIFI is part accelerator, part lab, and part systems-change engine. The cohort aims to develop financial models capable of reaching 10 million people and mobilizing USD 500+ million in blended and catalytic capital.

Why CGM and Medair Were Selected

CGM and Medair’s project—Verified Impact for Transformational Aid Leverage (VITAL)—confronts one of the most persistent structural failures in humanitarian finance: there is no functioning market for verified humanitarian outcomes, even though the world urgently needs one.

As our IMD assignment highlights, the problem is a multiple market failure:

• A missing market: No anchor buyer commits multi-year capital to purchase life-saving outcomes at scale, keeping the market too small and illiquid for institutional entry.
• Positive externalities & public goods: Everyone benefits from improved health, nutrition, and disease control, yet no single payer captures enough private value to justify early, large commitments.
• Weak institutions in fragile settings increase real and perceived risk, raising transaction costs for funders.
• Coordination failures keep DFIs, NGOs, corporates, and philanthropies in silos—each waiting for someone else to move first.

Compounding these failures is the reality that global needs are outpacing available aid: only 39.5% of UN humanitarian requirements were funded last year, leaving a $34.3 billion annual shortfall. Meanwhile, the World Economic Forum forecasts up to a 30% decline in official development assistance by 2025. Without new models, fragile communities will face deeper gaps in essential services.

The DIFI Opportunity: Turning Grant-Funded Work Into Investable Impact

The promise of the DIFI program lies in its design. It is not a classroom. It is a practitioner-driven innovation lab where teams learn, iterate, and build new financing models in real time—models grounded in the realities of conflict-affected communities.

For CGM and Medair, DIFI is enabling us to take the next step in turning Verified Impact Assets (VIAs) into a viable humanitarian asset class:

• Medair delivers directly monitored, independently verified health and nutrition outcomes—nutrition recovery, safe deliveries, IPC coverage.
• CGM transforms those outcomes into standardized, unitized, verified assets that corporates, philanthropies, DFIs, and impact investors can purchase to reliably fund life-saving work.
• The DIFI cohort provides a global platform for stress-testing the model with peers working on carbon finance, gender-lens bonds, parametric insurance, and outcome-based innovations worldwide.

Together, our goal is simple:
build a marketplace where life-saving humanitarian outcomes can be financed sustainably, at scale, and with institutional-grade trust.

A New Pathway for Humanitarian Finance

The DIFI program validates the growing global consensus:
traditional humanitarian financing is no longer adequate for a world defined by conflict, climate instability, and widening resource gaps. We need mechanisms that bring in new capital while protecting the core mission of saving lives.

CGM, Medair, and our DIFI cohort partners are helping design that future—one where humanitarian actors can plan beyond 12-month cycles, where outcomes are financed based on verified results, and where the global capital markets can finally play a meaningful role in supporting fragile communities.

This is not theoretical. It is happening now, through DIFI.

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