Executive Summary

Mental health is not a niche issue within global health or social policy. It is a cross-cutting determinant of whether funding strategies achieve their intended impact.

Amid significant global challenges such as climate shocks, geopolitical change, conflict, and technological change, funders are directing substantial resources towards resilience, health, and systems strengthening. Yet mental health, which shapes people’s ability to cope, learn, adapt, and participate, is still too often treated as peripheral rather than foundational.

This report calls for a shift in how portfolios are designed: from viewing mental health as a standalone programme area to recognising it as an enabling function across sectors and contexts.

Mental health intersects with nearly all global priorities. This report focuses on three strategic entry points: women’s health, child and youth development, and climate. These were selected because they combine substantial and growing funding flows, strong evidence of bidirectional linkage between mental health and sector outcomes, and real opportunity for funders to shape how integration is structured before norms consolidate. These are not the only possible entry points, but three domains where the conditions for integration are already in place.

This report examines these three domains as practical entry points for integration, unpacking how mental health interacts with women’s health systems, child and youth platforms, and climate resilience financing in distinct but overlapping ways. It finds that:

• While interest in integration is widespread, in practice this is often informal in nature and unfunded.

• Financing structures and measurement frameworks have not yet evolved to support consistent implementation.

• Across the pillars, integration has progressed furthest at the service level, but remains fragmented at portfolio and system level.

• Drawing on examples from funders already embedding mental health within sectoral strategies, the report identifies the conditions that distinguish credible integration from rhetorical alignment and sets out the funding design, measurement approaches, and system-level shifts required to move from pilot activity to sustainable scale.

The consequences of this uneven integration are visible across all three domains. Untreated depression, trauma, anxiety, and severe mental health conditions undermine maternal and reproductive health outcomes, early childhood development, educational attainment, adaptive capacity, and social cohesion. Addressing mental health within funding strategies is therefore not an add-on, it is a means of strengthening effectiveness and equity. Scaled treatment for depression and anxiety has been shown to lead to economic benefits of between $2.3 USD and $3 USD for every dollar invested, demonstrating that integration is not only strategic but economically sound.