Tagged: public private partnership

  • November 4, 2019

    Building impactful partnerships: What we M.U.S.T. do better

    Written by
    Ricardo Michel, Managing Director, FHI Partners

    This post was originally published on FHI Partners.

    According to Peter Drucker, the noted management theorist, “The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.” When I reflect on my time working with private-sector organizations, government agencies and international nongovernmental organizations — all of which were focused on solving global human development challenges — I recall the common refrain that “we can’t do it alone.” Only by working together do we stand a chance to eradicate poverty and promote prosperity. But sentiment alone is not enough.

    The promise of partnerships has resulted in an active body of work focused on facilitating public-private partnerships and devising private-sector engagement strategies, with the Sustainable Development Goals at the center of this dialogue. Specifically, private-sector involvement is increasingly called upon to drive global socio-ecological change. The increasing overlap between development and commercial challenges provides fertile ground for robust collaboration. However, we need to move beyond the announcements, handshakes and high-level dialogue.

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  • May 14, 2013

    The power of public–private partnerships in tackling global health challenges

    Written by
    Camille Saadé, Senior Project Director for Partnerships, FHI 360

    This week, GBCHealth will bring together some of the most prominent private-sector leaders in the world to discuss strategies for tackling pressing global health challenges. This year’s GBCHealth conference will focus on how business can better align its work with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The fourth MDG is to reduce mortality for children under 5 years old. The biggest threats to young children are pneumonia and diarrheal diseases, which are the cause of nearly 2 million deaths a year in children under 5 years old. The good news is that there is a simple way to prevent much of the spread of these two diseases: handwashing. And the private sector has been on the forefront of promoting handwashing in developing countries for more than a decade.

    In 2000, I co-founded the Global Public–Private Partnership for Handwashing along with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the World Bank/ Water and Sanitation Program. Today, FHI 360 operates the secretariat for the partnership, and our membership has expanded to include Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Colgate-Palmolive, the University of Buffalo, the World Health Organization, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the United Nations Children’s Fund. Each member of our partnership contributes financial resources, skills or time.

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