Osai Ojigho: Faith, Finance and Power – Why Communities Must Remain at the Centre

As development institutions increasingly engage with faith actors, the challenge is not simply how to mobilise more capital, but how to ensure finance serves people, strengthens local agency and delivers lasting development outcomes. Faith communities are not newcomers to development finance. For generations, they have stewarded resources, supported communities through crises and invested in people’s wellbeing. Today, development institutions such as the World Bank Group are showing growing interest in working with faith actors. This presents an important opportunity, but it also raises important questions.

Why does faith matter in financing?
From Christian Aid’s perspective, faith actors bring much more than access to funding or local networks. They bring values, trusted relationships and accountability to communities. They often remain present long after projects and funding cycles have ended. Faith-based organisations can help ensure that development finance remains focused on people rather than purely on financial metrics. They can bring the perspectives of communities that are too often excluded from decisions about investment, development priorities and economic reform.

For Christian Aid, finance is never neutral. The way money is governed, invested and distributed shapes who holds power, who bears risk and who benefits. Faith actors therefore have an important role in asking not only how much capital is mobilised, but whether it contributes to justice, dignity and human flourishing.
Our experience engaging with development finance institutions has taken three forms: as partners, as bridges and as critical friends.
As partners, we have worked directly with development finance institutions on programmes that improve people’s lives. One example was a climate adaptation initiative in Nicaragua, implemented with the Inter-American Development Bank and local partners. The programme helped cocoa and honey producers access climate information, strengthen resilience and improve livelihoods. The most important lesson was that sustainable development works best when communities are active participants in shaping solutions, not simply recipients of assistance.

As a bridge, we help connect faith communities, investors, financial institutions and communities on the ground. We also support churches and faith-based organisations as they navigate increasingly complex questions about ethical investment. Over time, the conversation has evolved from avoiding harmful investments towards asking how financial assets can actively contribute to climate resilience, economic justice and sustainable development.
This thinking has informed the launch of the Christian Aid Resilient Futures Fund (CARFF), a new initiative that aims to support locally owned climate-resilient enterprises in the Global South that often struggle to access affordable finance. These enterprises are frequently too large for grants but too small or too risky for conventional lenders. The fund seeks to explore whether finance can be structured differently, with local ownership, fair risk-sharing and community priorities at its heart.

At the same time, faith-based organisations must also be willing to act as critical friends. Christian Aid has long used its moral voice to challenge policies and practices that undermine development outcomes. From raising concerns about the social consequences of structural adjustment programmes in the 1990s to engaging in current debates on debt justice, climate finance and private finance mobilisation, we believe that partnership must never come at the expense of accountability.

What are the challenges?
One challenge is the risk of instrumentalisation. Faith actors should not be viewed simply as a means of gaining access to communities, improving project legitimacy or mobilising additional capital. Development institutions must recognise that faith actors bring expertise, evidence, community relationships and, when necessary, constructive criticism. Meaningful partnership requires engaging with the independent voice of faith communities, not only their networks. A second challenge concerns power and participation. Communities are increasingly involved in project implementation, but participation in delivery is not the same as influence over finance. Genuine inclusion means communities have a say in what gets funded, how risks are shared and how success is defined. A third challenge is ensuring that different forms of finance complement one another. Private investment can play an important role, but it cannot replace public finance, grant funding or the responsibility of governments and international institutions to meet development and climate commitments. Some of the most important investments in human dignity will never generate financial returns.

What is needed?
To overcome these challenges, development institutions and faith actors need a shared commitment to transparency, accountability and locally led development.
Partnerships should be built on complementary roles, mutual respect and a shared purpose. Communities should be involved from the outset in setting priorities and shaping solutions. Success should be measured not only by the volume of finance mobilised, but by whether people’s lives improve, whether resilience increases and whether communities gain greater agency over their futures. Most importantly, finance should serve people, not the other way around.

What role can PaRD play?
Multistakeholder platforms such as PaRD have a unique and valuable role to play. PaRD creates space for honest dialogue between governments, development institutions, faith actors, civil society and the private sector. It helps bridge different perspectives, encourages mutual learning and creates opportunities to test new approaches while remaining grounded in shared values. At a time when development finance is becoming increasingly complex, these spaces are essential. They allow faith actors to contribute practical experience, moral leadership and constructive scrutiny while helping development institutions better understand the realities faced by communities. Ultimately, the most important question is not how much finance we mobilise. It is whether our collective efforts help people and communities build the futures they want for themselves.