Enhancing private sector involvement in international development and efforts to achieve the SDGs

Amongst recent debates about the need to significantly scale up financial flows to developing countries to support their climate change adaptation and mitigation efforts and achieve the SDGs, how to successfully engage and work with the private sector and private capital providers has become increasingly prominent.

Which raises the question: What do effective partnerships between development agencies, national governments, NGOs and the private sector actually look like?

In a report for the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation (GPEDC) in 2015, Daniel Coppard (then) of Development Initiatives and I looked into this issue by examining a set of case studies of successful public/ private partnerships for development to identify if there were some common components to their success.

The questions we addressed were:

• What does an effective public/private partnership for development look like in practice?
• How can a shared agenda between public and private actors be put into action?
• What are the challenges which might be faced and how can these be overcome?
• How do we collectively define success and what are the challenges we face?

In summary, the components of successful partnerships identified were:

1.????? Establish an in-country institutional platform for inclusive cross-sector dialogue and partnerships to ensure that these partnerships contribute effectively to meeting the development priorities of the country.?

2.????? Identify areas of common interest between public and private sector actors to ensuring that partnerships deliver shared value i.e. are mutually beneficial and are sustainable in the longer term.

3.????? Engage the private sector “upstream” in the elaboration of national and sectoral plans to develop a sense of shared ownership of challenges and potential solutions.

4.????? Align national and local plans for future private sector engagement with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

5.????? Establish a national database of companies willing to engage in development-related programmes and activities

6.????? Build pre-commitment mechanisms into partnerships as a way to ensure that dialogue is transformed into effective action and additional investment.

7.????? Establish systems of independent monitoring and verification of the results of developmental partnerships to ensure they remain focused on meeting the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable groups in society.

8.????? Involve civil society and local NGOs in both dialogue and partnerships, whether at national, regional or local levels if you really want to understand and address the needs of the poor and be able to engage effectively with disadvantaged communities.

9.????? An important cross-cutting theme in virtually all of the public-private partnerships reviewed is the importance of transparency and willingness to share data and other analytical information.

10. Ensure that any new international partnerships established to address cross-country (or global) development challenges have a clear, defined mandate to avoid duplication of efforts.

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Case studies reviewed included:

• Ethiopia Public Private Consultative Forum (EPPCF)
• Zambia’s Business in Development Facility (BIDF)
• Jordan Valley Water Forum (JVWF)
• Global Alliance for Vaccines & Immunisation (GAVI)
• Mozambique’s Private Sector Conferences between 1995 - 2013
• Heineken’s partnership with Netherlands government to improve local sourcing of products and develop local value chains (including in Ethiopia)
• Roshan Telecom’s Provision of Mobile Financial Services in Afghanistan
• USAID & Coca Cola’s Water & Development Alliance (WADA) and the Water Resource Management Programme in Bolivia
• Open Contracting Partnership
• Improving Ebola Response through the use of mobile data – experiences of Geopoll and Keystone Accountability
• Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI)
• Private Infrastructure Development Group (PIDG)
• New Alliance for Food Security & Nutrition

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Further work to build on this analysis, verify the results and particularly to support the development of country-level partnership hubs seems needed now more than ever.

The full report is available here:

https://alanhardingdevecon.wordpress.com/

https://devinit.org/resources/the-role-of-the-private-sector-in-development-effectiveness-common-components-for-success-in-future-partnerships/