Development Finance Advisor

Tags: climate change Law finance language Environment
  • Added Date: Monday, 04 August 2025
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Description

Background:

Mercy Corps is a global team working together on the front lines of crisis, disaster, poverty, and climate change to create a world where everyone can prosper. Beyond delivering aid to meet urgent needs, we develop long-term solutions to make lasting change possible. Our mission: to alleviate suffering, poverty, and oppression by helping people build secure, productive, and just communities.

Purpose / Project Description:

In response to significant shifts in the global funding landscape, Mercy Corps is undertaking a โ€˜Future Stateโ€™ planning initiative to transform its financial and operating structure. A key element of this strategy is a portfolio model that blends traditional grant-funded programs and private philanthropy with innovative, market-oriented initiatives. This model is designed to attract and engage a more diverse set of funders, including impact investors, corporate partners, and Development Finance Institutions (DFIs). Achieving this will require rethinking not only how we finance our work, but also how we design, structure, and deliver it for greater scalability and investment-readiness

While Mercy Corps has a long history of impactful projects in areas like climate resilience, market systems development, and economic opportunity, our internal expertise has primarily focused on securing and managing institutional grants. Given Mercy Corpsโ€™ experience implementing a wide range of innovative programming (including through a social impact investment fund of our own), we believe that this is the moment to explore how these initiatives can be expanded upon to evolve into a more significant portfolio that responds to the interests and demands of alternative (e.g. non-grants based) financing mechanisms.

Given this context, Mercy Corps seeks to hire a subject expert in development finance to help our organization take intentional and well-informed actions to move us toward a position of increased competitiveness over the coming years. Mercy Corps has already been doing preliminary work to pre-position in this area; therefore, the consultant will be expected to complement and align with these efforts.

Consultant Objectives:

The primary objective of this consultancy is to develop a framework and a set of practical tools for country, regional, and global teams that will enable Mercy Corps' leadership to effectively position and sell our programmatic work to a new audience of non-traditional funders. The consultant will provide an analysis of how the types of interventions DF donors/investors are looking for match Mercy Corpsโ€™ existing and potential future portfolio. The consultant will also provide specific recommendations for what are the best modalities to pursue to successfully translate our impact into investable and scalable models, particularly in fragile contexts where MC has a comparative advantage. The ultimate goal is to provide a clear, actionable blueprint for engaging with new financial partners.

Consultant Activities:

The consultant will be expected to undertake the following activities:

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