Scaling for Impact
Learnings for Business-NGO Partnerships from Water Stewardship Interventions
Business and NGO collaborations are more critical than ever in driving sustainability. The challenges we face – climate change, inequality, water scarcity, biodiversity loss – are deeply interconnected and increasingly urgent. No single actor, whether a business, government, or NGO, can solve them alone. Meaningful progress demands coordinated action.
These collaborations offer a powerful way to turn shared challenges into shared opportunities – supporting communities, strengthening resilience, and building more sustainable business models in a time of volatility.
So, what makes these partnerships truly effective? And how can we future-proof them as the sustainability agenda evolves in complexity and scale?
We identified the lessons drawing on over two decades of water stewardship activity by Coca-Cola Europe, combined with independent interviews with 37 senior experts and reviews of the emerging opportunities in the field.
Vice President, Sustainability and Public Policy
Coca-Cola Europe
The seven key success factors to grow impact and future-proof partnerships:
- Trusted: Both partners need to build trust, so they are not just willing to work with each other but are excited to deliver impact together. By better understanding each other’s goals along with transparent ongoing communication, they build trust in shared authentic intentions. This supports internal buy-in and facilitates collaboration and innovation.
- Value Creation-oriented: Framing a strong business case for any given partnership – like securing supply chain resilience in the case of water – ensures internal support and long-term commitment for the company. Articulating strong business benefits, alongside social and environmental value, helps NGOs diversify their funding sources and makes them more resilient to changes in donor priorities
- Systemic: Greater impact and value come when partners can expand beyond initial pilot projects and individual collaborations to engage multiple stakeholder groups and create systemic solutions.
- Sustained: Shifting from a tactical to a strategic approach with longer-term partnerships that unlock more impact. This also creates more certainty so NGOs and businesses can plan and invest more effectively.
- Capability-building: Partnerships where businesses and NGOs actively help each other grow capabilities and deliver higher-impact, mutually beneficial, and future-ready solutions.
- Adaptive and Innovative: Impactful partnerships remain agile and ambitious: evolving goals, roles, and innovating approaches to sustain and increase impact without getting stuck.
- Measured: Ensuring the final projects are effectively measured to build transparency and confidence around impact through streamlined data.
