For social enterprises, NGOs and other impact-focused organisations, consortiums are rarely the easy path to scale. They tend to be slower, more complex and harder to manage than working with a single organisation. But consortiums can also produce solutions that are broader in perspective, stronger in legitimacy and more resilient in practice.

Take the KUWAZA child protection consortium in Zanzibar, involving Pathfinder International, ActionAid and C-Sema. Government stakeholders were more willing to back the model precisely because it came from a united front of NGOs, not from one organisation advancing its own agenda. That collective credibility helped the initiative gain traction and expand its reach.

Over the past few years, Spring Impact has supported the KUWAZA initiative and other consortiums tackling issues ranging from child protection to women’s economic empowerment, in geographies that include Bulgaria, Egypt and Zanzibar.

Each brought different histories, structures and ambitions, but together they highlight important lessons about what makes scaling through consortiums distinct, and how to make this sort of collaborative effort work.

In a recent article for NextBillion, Emma Colenbrander, Managing Director at Spring Impact, shares five key lessons we’ve learned from working with multi-organisation partnerships.