Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals will require an exponential increase in collaboration among government, business, civil society and development agencies. This is a heavy demand to place. Collaborating across sectors with different interests, motivations, cultures and timescales to create equitable, mutually-beneficial and accountable partnerships is seriously challenging.
In order to drive forward collaboration we will need to equip all societal sectors at multiple levels with an essential range of partnering skills and competencies: a collaborative mindset, a deep understanding of how other sectors think and work, the necessary human relationship and negotiation skills, and a technical knowledge of the process and building blocks of effective partnership.
The Partnering Academy is being developed as a direct response to the demand for partnering competency at scale.
The Partnering Academy is a major new initiative to build up the specialist skills and competencies that all organisations require to be able to collaborate effectively across sectors. The aim is to make training globally accessible and affordable through a blended learning, modular approach, mixing online training with in-country, in-person training courses.
With a consortium of INGOs, UN Agencies and training organisations, the Academy will build up a cadre of certified trainers and use a training-of-trainers cascading approach to scale up the delivery of training events. With a range of courses and modules, the Academy will award formal qualifications and provide an externally-recognised professional partnering development pathway.
The Academy’s business model aims to become self-funding through fees so that, while economies of scale aim to keep the costs of participation low, trainings will be run on a commercially viable, self-sustaining basis to ensure that the model itself can be scaled up.
One particular focus will be the creation of modules to build governments’ capability to work more effectively with the private sector as partners in delivering the SDGs.
To discuss involvement in the Partnering Academy, please contact Darian Stibbe: darian.stibbe@partnerinit.org.