In an age of disruption, how can we strengthen resilience in emerging markets?

Resilience used to mean recovery: how quickly a firm or economy could get back to business as usual after a shock. That definition is outdated. Today, disruption is no longer an exception; it is a defining feature of the current environment.

Persistent turbulence means resilience is not just survival in the short term, but investing, innovating and growing, even when outlooks are uncertain.

In collaboration with McKinsey & Company, the World Economic Forum’s Resilience Consortium has been analysing how leaders are responding to this volatile operating environment. The new white paper, Resilient Firms and Economies: How Companies, Governments, and Multilateral Development Banks Can Unlock Growth in Emerging Markets, shows that while leaders increasingly see resilience as crucial to competitiveness, just one in four companies feels equipped to manage disruptions across key resilience dimensions.

Prioritizing resilience and taking a forward-leaning approach is especially important for emerging markets, which often carry high exposure to instability, but are crucial drivers of growth.

Emerging markets sit at a crossroads of opportunity and risk. They are among the most dynamic engines of global growth, yet often are more exposed to climate disruption, geopolitical fragmentation and supply chain dislocation.

The potential is significant. According to the IMF’s World Economic Outlook Data Mapper (2025), emerging market and developing economies represent 60% of global GDP. If emerging markets can withstand shocks and adapt quickly, while investing in the future, they will be better positioned for immediate and long-term growth. The benefits will also be widespread: more stable supply chains, a stronger global economy and faster progress on shared global priorities.

However, without stronger infrastructure, digital adoption, better access to capital and more predictable policy environments, structural challenges will suppress investment and productivity. The result is not just slower growth, but lost opportunity across these economies.

Four priorities, if advanced together at scale, can help build resilience and drive growth.

1) Strengthening infrastructure and supply chains

Reliable energy, transport, and logistics are the backbone of stable, competitive economies. In many emerging markets, infrastructure gaps still make countries more exposed to disruptions and can hold back productivity.

Moving faster often comes down to better coordination. Governments can set clear priorities and build a realistic pipeline of projects. Multilateral development banks (MDBs) can help reduce risk and make projects more viable. Private capital can then help deliver at scale.

Taken together, these dynamics point toward important practical enablers to support collaboration: blended finance approaches that help share risk, clearer and more consistent guarantee frameworks, and innovative financing options that better match local market conditions — including local-currency solutions where appropriate.

2) Accelerating digitalization and skills development

Digital infrastructure plays a growing role in productivity and participation in global value chains, but access and uptake are still uneven across many emerging markets. Focused collaboration can help close these gaps.

Partnerships that bring together development finance, commercial lenders, and private operators can support more efficient and resilient digital infrastructure, while also strengthening local capacity. At the same time, investment in digital skills and local innovation ecosystems can help make sure technology adoption leads to broader economic opportunity, not just faster connectivity.

3) Expanding access to capital for SMEs

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) drive jobs and innovation, but many still struggle to access finance. Common barriers include perceived risk, high collateral requirements, and less developed credit markets.

Well-designed risk-sharing arrangements can help shift incentives and make lending more feasible. When combined with practical advisory support, these tools can encourage local financial institutions to extend credit to underserved entrepreneurs and smaller firms. Scaled thoughtfully and adapted to local conditions, approaches like this can unlock business growth that is currently out of reach for many SMEs.

4) Reducing policy frictions and uncertainty

Even when capital is available, unclear or shifting policies can slow investment. Predictable rules and consistent decision-making can reduce perceived risk and enable investors to commit capital over the long term. This also means creating stronger incentives for long-term investment from abroad — not only through stable policy frameworks, but by ensuring market access for foreign firms, either directly or through attractive partnership models

There are also practical tools governments can draw on. Existing resources and guidelines on public-private partnerships offer examples of standard clauses and common approaches to risk allocation that can make projects easier to structure and finance. Using these references, and keeping them up to date, can help shorten preparation timelines, improve bankability, and channel investment toward national priorities.

One reason resilience gaps persist is that resilience can look expensive in the short term, and many emerging markets face tight fiscal space.

That is precisely why collaboration matters. When governments provide clarity and credible project pipelines, businesses can invest with greater certainty. When MDBs de-risk priority investments and mobilise private capital, the cost of resilience falls and the returns rise. And when resilience is treated as a growth strategy, investments can be sequenced, starting with the highest-impact bottlenecks, building capacity in parallel, and measuring outcomes so progress compounds over time.

Emerging markets can shape the defining economic story of the coming decades. Whether that story becomes sustained opportunity will depend on their resilience.

The choice is not between resilience and growth. Done well, resilience is what makes growth possible.

To learn more, read the full white paper and to explore the latest Resilience Consortium activities, click here.