Putting some context to buzz-words – a practical guide to public-private partnerships

The phrase ‘public-private partnerships’ has recently joined the long list of new concepts for how to enable effective development and improve quality of life for people around the world. While these concepts are often very powerful tools, they are often poorly or inconstantly defined. That is why any chance to add the meat of real world examples to the bones of theoretical concept, should be welcomed.

Last month, I attended an excellent workshop in Berlin organised by German development consultancy, Endeva. The workshop took as its starting point Endeva’s report entitled ‘Bringing medicines to low-income markets’.

Endeva’s report offers the example of better drug distribution in developing countries, to offer an interesting guide to creating effective public-private partnerships, between public bodies like ministries of health and private organisations such as companies or NGOS.

Riders for Health was able share its experience of working in public-private partnership in all of its programmes in Africa to provide a practical, and successful example. In our programme in the Gambia, for instance, we partner with the Ministry of Health, GT Bank and the Skoll Foundation for Social Enterprise to manage the nation’s entire fleet of vehicles used for health care delivery. 

We are able to offer our technical expertise as a practical implementer of last mile distribution, so that the government can focus on its core competency of delivering health care. As the report highlights, one of the barriers to getting medicines out to low-income markets is lack of physical infrastructure, including lack of transport. Riders has the expertise to oversee and manage the transport aspect of the entire supply chain – from the central warehouses to the last mile down to the facilities – thereby providing critical logistical support to partner government agencies.

All of Riders work is done in partnership which is why one of the sections in the report which particularly resonated was on the four C’s identified by Endeva for a good partnership. These were:

• Commonalities – sharing a fundamental vision in common
• Complimentary – supplement or add to each other’s skills and assets
• Compatibility – sharing organisational culture and approaches to work
• Capacity – set, communicate and track specific goals, project timelines, assets, deliverables and governance structures

This is a simple but effective way of thinking about what it takes to make any partnership work, but particularly public-private partnerships where two very different organisations come together to make a difference.