In 2025, the Alliance for Peacebuilding launched the Building Peace Economies at Scale initiative to build bridges between peacebuilders and private sector actors with stakes in conflict-affected environments and issues. This initiative is curating intentional spaces and bringing together peacebuilding organizations and practitioners with impact investors, development finance institutions, multilateral development banks, corporations, venture capitalists, and policymakers to reconcile the fears, languages, and cultures of peacebuilding and business communities to align for-profit investments with peace process outcomes.
WHY
Today, global violent conflict is at record levels and rising, hampering many businesses that benefit from predictable environments for long-term planning and investment. At the same time, governments are dramatically reducing spending in programs that prevent conflict and build peace.
Countries that are more stable and peaceful have stronger economic indicators, including better economic output, more robust consumption, higher rates of foreign direct investment, increased trade, higher levels of new businesses, and lower risk premiums. Companies that adopt conflict-sensitive practices achieve better returns on investment by reducing operational disruptions, lowering security costs, and maintaining their social license to operate, ultimately resulting in more peaceful and stable regions. However, for the private sector to engage with peacebuilding, investors need to understand how peace benefits their investment decisions, and how to provide pivotal private capital needed for the peacebuilding sector to manage and mitigate conflict. Additionally, peacebuilding organizations working with the private sector ensures that businesses better manage risk and don’t contribute to conflict.
While there is emerging quantitative and qualitative data to make the case for robustly integrating the peacebuilding and private sectors, we need more evidence from diverse geographies, industries, and investment contexts demonstrating how integrating peacebuilding approaches with private sector initiatives can yield specific returns or cost savings.
To meet this moment and begin tackling conflict and instability, more robust engagement with the private sector is vital. Fostering greater collaboration between the peacebuilding field and private sector actors will require establishing a common language, a shared evidence base, and standards that enable scalable best practices, demonstrate a profitable return on investment, and result in the building of peace and security. This initiative is building a coalition of experts across finance, government, venture capital, impact investment, philanthropy, and civil society who can identify leverage points—shared interests, complementary strengths, and opportunities for collective action. Join us!
WHAT
1. Build a Cross-Sector Community of Practice: Create sustainable partnerships among sectors that have not traditionally collaborated through convenings and structured conversations where participants identify shared interests and develop opportunities for joint action.
2. Establish Common Language, Standards, and Evidence: Develop common frameworks, indicators, and metrics that translate peacebuilding concepts into language investors understand, and vice versa. Document successful models through case studies, lessons learned, and practitioner reports showing how integrating peacebuilding with private sector investment produces measurable returns, cost savings, and peace outcomes across different regions and industries.
3. Promote Integrated Knowledge and Adoption: Strengthen peacebuilders' ability to engage credibly with finance, corporate, and policy sectors by enabling peace professionals to explain financial value and communicate effectively with investors. Support the integration of peacebuilding principles into risk assessments, ESG/CSR frameworks, and supply chain standards at the donor, government, and multilateral levels.
Interested in learning more about the Building Peace Economies at Scale initiative?
Reach out to Emily Sample or complete this form to receive updates!
HOW
The Building Peace Economies at Scale initiative has been advancing these goals by:
Addressing the urgent need for standardized metrics and evidence at the intersection of business and peace through expert interviews and evidence collection to align with peacebuilding indicators in the Eirene Peacebuilding Database.
Landscaping overlapping research and practice sub-fields under the Peace Economies umbrella, including (but not limited to) human rights and business, business and conflict, business and peace, peace-focused impact investment, PeaceTech, sustainable finance, security and human rights, sustainable development, peace finance, peace bonds, corporate social responsibility, and environment, social, and governance sectors.
Highlighting how peace technology represents an avenue for both peace impact and financial profit and showing how the concept works in practice through seminars with B Ventures and the Heartland Initiative.
Building the evidence base by sharing analyses of successful business contributions to violence reduction, social cohesion, and governance and examining cautionary cases where well-intentioned investments inadvertently exacerbated tensions through report launches, book talks, case studies, and establishing the Building Peace Economies research repository.
Developing connections and sharing bridge building recommendations with intersecting fields, like youth, peace and security, women, peace, and security, atrocity prevention, and environmental peacebuilding through expert panels and partnerships.
Representing the priorities and potential of the peacebuilding community in financial fora, including the World Bank Fragility Forum.
Establishing a new coalition listserv of 350+ individuals spanning civil society, impact investment, venture capital, philanthropy, corporate, and multilateral development sectors. Join us!
KEY RESOURCES
Please send resources to be added to the Building Peace Economies repository to Emily Sample.
OECD. Private Finance Mobilisation Report 2026. OECD Publishing, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1787/a871a032-en.
Federman, Sarah. Corporate Reckoning: How Businesses Can Address Historical Wrongs. The MIT Press, 2026. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/15407.001.0001.
● AfP hosted a book talk with Professor Sarah Federman: watch the recording here.
Balfousia, Panagiota. “From Fragmentation to Insight: Why Data Convergence Matters for Scaling Impact.” The GIIN, April 24, 2026.
“Building Peace Economies: What Is Actually Happening Now, and What’s Still Missing” Peace Finance, January 12, 2026.
Miklian, Jason, Mark van Dorp, and John Katsos. Unlocking the Peace Premium: An Evidence-Based Review of the Potentials and Pitfalls of Private Sector Finance for Conflict Transformation. LSE Ideas, 2025.
Forrer, John J., and Terry R. Gray. Impact Investing at a Crossroads: A Pathway Forward. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2025.
Business and Peace Report 2024: Peace: A Good Predictor of Economic Success. Institute for Economics & Peace, 2024.
Smits, Marcel, Daniel Hyslop, and Riccardo Vinci. 2023. “Mapping Investment Guidance for Peace: A Comprehensive Review of Existing ESG, Impact and Sustainable Finance Principles and Guidance for Peace.” Finance for Peace, Geneva.
Interpeace and SEB. 2022. “Peace Bonds: Feasibility Study — Assessing the Potential of a New Asset Class that Can Lower Risk and Enhance Peace.” Geneva: Interpeace and SEB.
Economic Value of Peace: Measuring the Global Economic Impact of Violence and Conflict. Institute for Economics & Peace, 2021.
Espinosa, Arlette, Valeria Medinaceli Molina, and Nora von Wintersdorff. Gender Lens Impact Investing 2021. AlphaMundi, 2021.
Miklian, Jason, John E. Katsos, and Rina Alluri, eds. Business, Peacebuilding and Sustainable Development. Business and Peacebuilding Series. Routledge, 2019.
Evers, Tobias. 2010. “Doing Business and Making Peace? A Review of Research on Business-Based Peacebuilding.” Swedish Institute of International Affairs, Occasional Paper No. 3.
Tools
The Global Impact Investing Network’s (GIIN) IRIS+ is a set of tools and guidance that translates impact intentions into measurable results.
“Impact For Decision-Making: An Online Curriculum On Impact-Financial Integration” is guide through the concepts, processes, and tools investors need to optimize portfolios for integrated impact and financial goals from Impact Frontiers.
The IFI Tool from the Social Finance Institute is an interactive, open-source, online tool, with the goal of illustrating the potential effects of impact-first investments on a portfolio of philanthropic assets.
The Peace Finance Impact Framework from Finance for Peace to help public and private investors plan, partner, report and ultimately realize peace impacts that reduce risks for investors and communities.
The “Investing for Impact: A Decision-Making Tool” from the Annie E. Casey Foundation is a practical framework to evaluate impact investments that strengthen families, communities and economic opportunity