Seizing the Opportunity in Public-Private Partnerships

This report examines opportunities and challenges for using public-private partnerships in development, specifically through the lens of the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Millennium Challenge Corporation. Although other agencies in the U.S. government work on international development and engage with the broader private sector, they will not be the focus of this paper even though they may face similar opportunities, challenges, and solutions. Current concerns are how the U.S. government can improve its ability to partner with the private sector and how lessons for creating and maintaining relationships with the private sector can be institutionalized in order to be able to set up partnerships or projects that work to scale and then make them sustainable. Within these larger concerns are questions about what the private sector needs in order to partner with the U.S. government in the development context, and why the Global Development Alliance model used at the U.S. Agency for International Development has been a good example of how the U.S. government has approached private-sector partnerships in a more dynamic way.