On the 16th of April 2014, at the first high level meeting of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation, Justine Greening, the UK Secretary of State for International Development, launched Unleashing the power of business: A practical Roadmap to systematically scale up the engagement of business as a partner in development.
Introducing the Roadmap, Justine Greening outlined the “crucial role of the private sector in global partnership” to “bring together all development players to make the most of investment into development”. Stressing that “both public and private sector need to think differently about each other to work together effectively”, she noted the “need to drive culture changes” within the public sector to engage with the private sector, and confirmed her strong endorsement of the Roadmap, encouraging organisations to get behind it.
The Roadmap, researched and written by The Partnering Initiative with funding from DfID to input into the GPEDC, provides a systematic, integrated and – most importantly – actionable approach to scaling up development partnerships with business at the country level. It identifies three key milestones, for both business actors and development actors, towards achieving the vision of business fully integrated and engaged as a partner in development.
To navigate the journey, the report outlines five essential areas of action, from building trust and understanding across sectors to building institutional capacity for partnering, through inclusive planning of development priorities, creating in-country platforms for partnership, and maintaining partnership effectiveness through monitoring and evaluation. It also draws attention to the need for a support system (including funding and intermediary organisations, partnership brokers, capacity building organisations and M&E) to catalyse the five areas of action, achieve the necessary scale, and mainstream the approach.
In her introduction to the report, Justine Greening announced the creation of new Development Cooperation Hubs in Nigeria and Kenya, in addition to those already in place in Mozambique, Colombia and Zambia. She stressed the practical importance of creating platforms – Development Cooperation Hubs – at country level with neutral brokers to create a level playing field, for business, government, but also civil society and donors.
The report draws on TPI’s many years of experience helping to make partnerships happen on the ground, as well as interviews with 40 partnership experts from across the world, an online survey, online consultations and in-person meetings, and an extensive review of partnership literature. Download the full report / summary report
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