The report, “Anticipate and localize: Leveraging humanitarian funding to create more sustainable food systems,” identifies crucial reforms to humanitarian food aid that would improve response to crises, avert future crisis, and help build resilient, sustainable food systems.

It is the second of four reports from The Rockefeller Foundation’s Global Nutrition Security portfolio, led by Catherine Bertini, former Executive Director of the World Food Programme and 2003 World Food Prize Laureate. The Report Chair is Carol Bellamy, former Executive Director of UNICEF. They draw on decades of experience in the global humanitarian and development sectors.

In addition, the report is informed by the Foundation-sponsored Convening Group on Funding for Sustainable Food Security, which brought together nearly two dozen experts in food insecurity and food aid from around the world, including people with lived experience, to examine how to best mobilize and leverage funding to ensure food security for all. Three convenings held in late 2022 generated an abundance of creative and provocative ideas to overcome the severe shortcomings in the global governance and delivery of food aid.

The report identifies those shortcomings as a lack of effective anticipation of need; a lack of localization; and a failure to break silos and join the funding “dots.” Its recommendations address each of those shortcomings with specific, concrete actions that should be taken now and over the next seven-to-ten years to reset the world on the path of food security for all through aligning humanitarian aid and global development to build resilient and sustainable food systems.

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This white paper summarizes the major themes and takeaways from the summit — including how to break the “boom and bust” cycles of emergency response, how to translate interest in EIDs into R&D for effective vaccines, and how to ensure that equitable access to those lifesaving technologies.

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The 2022 Menino Survey of Mayors details perspectives shared by a representative sample of 118 mayors leading U.S. cities with populations of more than 75,000 residents.

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The group is comprised of Foundation grantees, including epidemiologists and academic researchers from U.S.-based institutions in Houston, Louisville, Phoenix, Tulsa and Atlanta. They all recognize wastewater surveillance as a powerful public health tool that is:

• Timely – wastewater surveillance can provide early indications of community transmission of Covid-19 and of emerging variants. It is often able to do this before clinical data emerge, because people often don’t seek care unless they are severely ill.
• Cost-effective – wastewater sampling can often be done at a fraction of the cost of clinical testing. Variant detection at a population level versus a single clinical sample is a more efficient approach.
• Equitable – as a passive and anonymous monitoring system, wastewater can provide a more equitable snapshot of health in the community. Everyone contributes, so even populations that lack access to quality health care and may be overlooked by other health data systems are included.

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Download the report to learn more about the state of the initiative and initial thoughts on its longer-term directions.

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The Council provides 20 evidence-based recommendations that grew out of the basic understanding that vaccine equity starts at the community level and that efforts to build vaccine confidence and demand need to be prioritized as much as efforts to create vaccine supply.

The Council’s recommendations, alongside other in-depth readouts from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Equity-First Vaccination Initiative, serve as a roadmap for how to build vaccine and health equity into public health consistently, healthcare and civic society responses broadly – and why we must do so.

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One of the biggest obstacles to achieving net zero emissions globally by 2050 is the lack of financing from public and private sources for climate change mitigation and adaptation. This climate financing gap is made more acute by the use of inconsistent definitions, methodologies, and disclosures. Without standardized taxonomies, it can be difficult — if not impossible — for catalytic investors to trace financing flows and pinpoint gaps they can meaningfully target their dollars to.

A new report, authored by The Rockefeller Foundation in coordination with Boston Consulting Group, aims to help investors across the public-and private sectors gain clarity. What Gets Measured Gets Financed: Climate Finance Funding Flows and Opportunities aggregates data from across the climate finance arena, examines the methodologies of leading publications, and attempts to triangulate missing insights.

“We all know that more finance is needed for climate change, but until this report, there was no real way to compare how the many different types of financial flows were adding up relative to needs, or to determine where and into which sectors investment is most urgent,” said Veronica Chau, Partner & Director, Sustainable Investing & Social Impact at BCG. “This is a crucial decade for climate-finance actors to go from pledging support for climate initiatives to deploying it. But the absence of clear and reliable data has been a major roadblock.”

This report provides industry practitioners with a comprehensive view of how climate finance needs are evolving relative to flows and identifies where the most critical gaps in climate finance data reporting are, and where the need for taxonomic standards is most urgent.

“All actors, from country leaders to company leaders, must not only fulfill their climate commitments but also make their progress against those commitments transparent by improving the quality and consistency of their reporting,” said Elizabeth Yee, Executive Vice President of Programs, The Rockefeller Foundation.

The report also provides guidance for how the finance gap can be overcome and recommends that all key actors in the climate finance ecosystem play bigger, more active roles. Governments will need to trace climate finance needs, flows, and outcomes for necessary structural interventions such as tax incentives and subsidies. Corporations need to disaggregate climate finance initiatives rather than rolling costs and allocations under business operations in order for investments and performance to be accurately assessed. And market-return-seeking investors need to make the end use of their proceeds more transparent, so that others in the climate finance arena can better discern the gaps and needs that remain.

As the authors note, “the clock is ticking.” If the world is to meet its ambition of achieving net zero by 2050, the time to act is now.

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The report delivers a new framework to guide vaccine demand generation strategies overall and provides the following policy recommendations for public health officials, institutions, and policy makers to build and maintain a stronger public health system to protect Americans from this, and future, pandemics.

• Invest in a communications infrastructure – similar to other aspects of pandemic preparedness – that builds trust in public health guidance over time and makes public health communications everyone’s job. This includes building in flexibility to address evolving information needs and to fight disinformation tactics that sow fear and doubt in vaccinations.
• Be in solidarity with community by aligning with their priorities, needs, and values to make it easier for individuals to see how the vaccine fits into their life and frame vaccination as a decision that makes sense. This is an essential component that builds trust, integrates interventions into other needed services, and creates a more equitable public health system.
• Integrate vaccine demand assessments and strategic planning into pandemic preparedness and resilience efforts at all levels of government, industry, and the nonprofit sector – from the start.

This report is based on learnings from The Rockefeller Foundation’s Equity-First Vaccination Initiative (EVI) – which funded community-led work on vaccine access and confidence in communities of color in five U.S. cities – as well as an extensive literature review and interviews with key experts, advocates, practitioners and authorities.

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The Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security (GIWPS) and The Rockefeller Foundation co-convened global women leaders on June 20-23, 2022 at the Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Bellagio, Italy for the Global Women Leaders Summit to address the urgent need for action to advance gender equity.

The full recommendations from the Summit, available for download on this page, include urgent calls to action to end gender injustice once and for all. They rely on the wisdom and experience of the distinguished women who joined the Summit, many of whom are current and former heads of state, to carry forward a future where women and girls are fully represented.

This work is supported as part of The Rockefeller Foundation’s Connected Leaders Platform (CLP) which supports breakthrough solutions and collective action. The CLP attracts leaders, facilitates connections, and supports integration of the network’s resources, skills, and perspectives to drive major change.

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