Global mental health challenges require a unified, collaborative response that mobilizes the full spectrum of financial capital. To address the persistent financing gap, the Coalition for Mental Health Investment (CMHI) is championing a strategic shift toward more sustainable and collaborative financing approaches globally.

Adopting Smart Financial Mechanisms

The CMHI highlights that smart financial mechanisms successfully deployed in other sectors can be adapted for mental health. The goal is to allow diverse types of funders to work together, reduce risk, and unlock new resources on a global scale. This collaborative approach provides practical guidance for funders, implementers, innovators, policymakers, and advocates seeking to maximize impact.

Key Resources for Action

To facilitate this crucial shift toward greater investment and scale, CMHI offers essential resources exploring these innovative strategies:

• Mental Health Financing Guidebook: This resource provides an overview of the key challenges in the current financing landscape and offers a clear framework for identifying innovative financing mechanisms that can reduce risk and unlock scale through cross-sector collaboration.
• Financing Mental Health Overview: This summary outlines the pressing societal and economic considerations that are driving funders to be more ambitious in seeking sustainable equity and measurable mental health impact around the world.
• Financing Mechanism Explorer (Coming Soon!): This interactive tool will help funders, implementers, and other stakeholders directly identify the financing approaches best suited to close specific gaps when funding specific interventions.

By promoting collaborative, risk-reducing strategies and providing these valuable tools, CMHI is driving the global effort to ensure mental health services receive the investment needed to meet demand.

This document is designed to complement and build upon the existing body of research concerning mental health financing and innovative mechanisms. This includes recent works such as:

• Investing in the future: How better mental health benefits everyone (McKinsey Health Institute, 2025);
• Financing for NCDs and mental health: Where will the money come from? (World Health Organization and World Bank Group, 2025); and
• Increase, improve and integrate: the way forward for financing NCDs and Mental Health (United for Global Mental Health, (United for Global Mental Health, 2024).