Our Strategy
Creating a peace dividend ecosystem to harness market forces for peace
The Peace Dividend Initiative (PDI) is dedicated to harnessing market forces for peace.
Stimulating economic development in countries emerging from conflict is challenging, due to fragile institutions, insecurity and illicit networks. Therefore, reputable businesses, investors, and multilateral organisations often move in cautiously and struggle to allocate capital effectively.
As a result, the peace dividend stalls and a return to violence remains a high risk, exacerbated by persistent unemployment and economic decline – otherwise known as the ‘conflict trap’.
We bridge the gap between peace mediation and peace-supporting commercial investments by working closely with a network of trusted peace-mediators. Therefore, PDI is able to design conflict-sensitive investments to meet peace-making objectives, and to ensure close accompaniment of investments.
Who do we work with to harness market forces for peace?
Entrepreneurs
We help entrepreneurs develop their ideas and transform them into sustainable and peace-supporting economic opportunities through business incubation, mentoring, access to capital and partners.
We connect them to local, national and global markets to create peace value chains.
Communities
We engage communities in hard to reach areas with humility and purpose, building long term trusted relationships to ensure the projects we develop are locally owned and driven.
By putting communities in the lead of building peace value chains, peace is built organically from the grassroots.
Mediators and peace sector
We serve the peace and mediation sector, complementing the work of existing peace sector actors. PDI’s work creates new entry points for mediation and dialogue projects.
PDI is closely connected to global peace mediation organisations, with access to a network of over 600 mediators spread across more than 40 conflict-affected countries.
Private sector partners and investors
We identify peace-supporting economic opportunities and engage responsible private sector actors and investors to build businesses in fragile and hard to access areas.
We have developed the +P, a peace impact framework that ensures investments and activities remain peace-supporting.
Multilateral donors and concessional financiers
Harnessing the incentives of markets, our model generates peace supporting deal flow, providing rapid economic benefit to those turning away from violence and towards better economic futures.
We accelerate the allocation capital efficiently and effectively while complementing existing mechanisms.
How do we harness market forces for peace?
PDI’s interventions focus on the hardest-to-reach actors in fragile and conflict-affected areas. PDI combines the best practices of the peace-building world, through neutral, consistent and discreet dialogues, and the organisational traits of a start-up, focusing on agility and lean project development.
PDI works on both community and national levels. PDI’s mechanism allows it to identify and develop peace-supporting economic opportunities. As part of its work, PDI provides market access to entrepreneurs to fill structural gaps preventing private sector actors and investors from flourishing in post-conflict economies.
Dialogue
We advance peace processes by supporting mediation with economic dialogue. This allows us to consolidate existing peace processes with concrete economic opportunities, or to re-engage conversation with lowest common denominators when political conversation is stalling.
Outcomes:
- Economic dialogue
- Scoping of opportunities
- Prototyping of peace-supporting business models
Incubation
We build peace-supporting businesses and economic opportunities in conflict-affected areas through the PDI Peace Value Chains process. We focus on building businesses and enterprises with strong local ownership and digital models, delivering the maximum possible value back to staff and communities.
Outcomes:
- Development of innovative and peace-supporting global value chains
- Growth, partnerships and commercialisation
- Investment-readiness through +P, our set of peace-supporting investment principles
Investment
We bridge the gap between investors and the peace-making sector. As a result, PDI is prototyping two blended-finance funds to rapidly invest in fragile areas and lock-in peace by creating livelihoods and locally-tethered economic growth.
Outcomes (in progress):
- Peace Venture Fund (PVF) to investing in peace-supporting SMEs
- Peace Dividend infrastructure Fund (PDiF) to facilitate larger scale investments, with the potential to develop infrastructure and transform industries