Engaging Business in Development - Results of an international benchmarking study, GPPi 2007

Description
In the past decade many bilateral and multilateral development donors have launched innovative new programs designed to engage the business community in pursuing development objectives. This report covers public private partnership (PPP) programs of 6 bilateral donors. The various partnership programs covered as part of this study differ in many important aspects, reflecting among other things the different organizational contexts in which they have developed. As such, the purpose of the study is not to rate the performance of programs. Instead, the objective was to attain a comprehensive overview of existing partnership schemes (the different approaches donors have developed, the different tools they use) and to identify the potential for learning and cross-fertilization.

Chapter 1 provides and introduction to the topic and the programs covered. Chapter 2 develops a framework for understanding and classifying public-private partnerships in development assistance. The key results of the collaborative benchmarking exercise identifying best practices and lessons learned are discussed in depth in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 concludes with an outlook on likely advances for the partnership tool in development assistance, potential avenues for future research and possibilities for enhanced donor collaboration.

Methods for info gathering
The results of the study (conducted between October 2006 and May 2007) are based on extensive desk research, six donor workshops, and almost 70 semi-structured interviews with experts and practitioners in the area of collaboration with the private sector. As part of the study, GPPi also conducted a comprehensive stocktaking of the German BMZ program, analyzing the implementation of partnership projects by all the implementing agencies (GTZ, DEG, Sequa, InWent, and DED).