Sign up for our monthly newsletter R4D Insights to get the latest tools, resources, and news in global development.
We support country leaders to build strong systems and institutions that improve access to high-quality, affordable health care, improve educational opportunities for children, and reduce malnutrition.
Systems change is inherently hard. It’s even harder when country leaders don’t get the kind of support they need. At R4D we go beyond traditional technical assistance, pioneering new approaches to support country leaders.
Get insights from R4D directly in your inbox
We partner with country governments, local organizations and donor institutions in two ways:
We work alongside our partners through each stage of the systems change process — helping them drive their agenda, identify root causes of challenges, develop and implement solutions, and continuously learn and adapt to sustain outcomes.
We support country leaders to uncover the root causes of the challenges they’re facing. And we help them identify and synthesize relevant experience from other countries across our network that have tackled similar problems, turning global experience and innovative ideas into practical insights that help leaders make informed decisions.
We help country leaders bring together the right stakeholders to co-create effective solutions. As skilled facilitators, our team engages diverse voices in meaningful dialogue, helping strengthen processes, foster buy-in, and co-design solutions that are more likely to succeed.
We support country leaders to implement their solutions with an emphasis on learning-by-doing. R4D’s Coaching Approach works through existing infrastructure and processes — avoiding the creation of parallel systems. This approach strengthens national institutions to deliver over the long-term.
We support country leaders to learn what’s working — and what isn’t — to continuously adapt, iterate and improve. Our approach prioritizes answering the questions our partners care about, using methods that are feasible. This builds resilience and helps strengthen institutions’ capacity to embed learning into their future work.
We strengthen local organizations’ capacity to produce evidence and provide the support country leaders need. We connect them to regional and global networks, and help global partners coordinate their efforts.
Our approach supports and elevates local expertise and organizations to ensure they continue supporting country leaders long after global funding ends. We complement and strengthen our local partners’ capabilities — positioning them as the go-to resources for both national and global actors.
We create and strengthen learning communities and networks that generate evidence, support change agents to learn from one another and co-create promising new approaches. Our Collaborative Learning approach is always country led and centers the expertise of local change agents.
We work with development partners to ensure their strategies and programs are coordinated and aligned with country leaders’ priorities — making investments more responsive, sustainable and impactful. This also reduces the burden on country leaders to navigate and manage competing priorities.
R4D is a mission-driven organization. We’re proud of what we can achieve in just one year.
10k+
Change agents supported
Building skills, knowledge, and networks to drive equitable change.
130+
New knowledge products
Connecting change agents to critical evidence and supporting them to use it.
40
Systems changes documented
Improving government policies, financing and institutions to deliver sustainable change.
31
Learning networks launched or strengthened
Connecting global change agents to share learning, co-create solutions, and drive progress together.
Our team of 150+ experts in 9 countries unites local knowledge with global experience and learning networks.
What does it take to make primary health care free at the point of use, and keep it sustainable? Go inside Ghana's FPHC reform to see how government leaders and R4D are building the technical foundation for this ambitious UHC push.
How do we turn innovation into lasting impact? The latest blog from the International Development Innovation Alliance (IDIA) — which R4D founded and serves as Secretariat — explores partnership-based approaches to scaling and unveils two new initiatives: the Capital Continuum for smarter innovation financing, and OASIS, an open space for AI tools, open-source code, and learnings from across the development sector.
Primary health care is one of the most consistent touchpoints in a young child's life. But in many countries, those interactions focus on physical health and miss other critical foundations of development. R4D's new toolkit, Strengthening Primary Health Care to Promote Optimal Child Development, offers practical guidance for integrating nurturing care — including responsive caregiving, early learning, nutrition, and safety and security — into existing health systems, helping decision-makers build a stronger foundation for children to thrive.
When practitioners gathered for Agora's inaugural session, the conversation moved past whether community pharmacies matter to the harder questions: why integration takes more than a policy change, and how networks can turn scattered pilots into national scale. Drawing on a recent landscape report and front-line experience from Kenya, three insights emerged about what it will actually take to give pharmacies and drug shops a formal place in primary health care.
Nathaniel Otoo, former CEO of the Ghana National Health Insurance Authority.
Susan Sparkes, Health Economist, World Health Organization
Catherine Hollander, Senior Program Associate, GiveWell
Jean-Paul Dossou, Director of CERRHUD, Benin
Abdulkadir Galgalo, Director General for the Ethiopian Pharmaceutical Supply Service
Fauzia Waqar, Centre for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP)
