While significant progress has undoubtedly been made in some areas of business / public health relations (notably in the area of infectious disease control), it is surely time to break this us-and-them deadlock when it comes to combatting NCDs. Unless we urgently seek a more productive basis for private sector engagement, we will collectively fail to meet the SDGs.

Two years after the adoption of the Global Goals (also called the Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs), there are still too few champions, ambassadors and implementers of this ambitious agenda. There are also too few partnerships for the goals being showcased, to inspire others and invite further action.

As experts in the field of partnership for sustainable development, my colleagues and I spend a lot of our time helping our partners and clients master what we call the ‘art and science of cross-sector partnering’.

Some magic quality emerges when people work in close sync with each other. We’ve all experienced the fellow feeling of being in a choir or band, a sports team or a friendship. It’s hard to explain what exactly this feeling is, or the importance of it: you have to experience it directly.