Partnering for Progress

Partnerships that pool the resources, capacities and experience of a wide range of actors around a specific challenge can drive African progress. This is the central message of this year’s Africa Progress Report.

At first view, this may seem like an overly obvious statement to make. After all, we have already seen ample proof of the transformative power of such partnerships. We have seen partnerships between public and private actors increase delivery of and access to healthcare. We have seen partnerships around mobile technology improve financial access for millions of Africans and transform entire business sectors. And we have seen partnerships spread access to goods, services and opportunities to marginalized segments of the population. In brief, we have seen partnerships drive development.

So why yet another report on partnerships? The answer is as straightforward as our argument. Because despite all the success stories, valuable lessons learned and proliferating reports and case studies, we are simply not seeing nearly enough proven models replicated or brought to scale across the continent to effect structural change. By whatever count, the number of successful partnerships remains far too small compared with both the potential and need for them. Too often, activities remain small-scale, localized and isolated, as partners lack the capacity, resources or incentives to scale up their operations, replicate them elsewhere, or deliver more than piecemeal change.

Against this background, we decided to identify the actions needed to create the policy framework, enabling environment and incentive structure required to spur further collaboration for progress. We argue that all actors, including national governments, international organisations, private companies and civil society actors, can do more to remove blockages and facilitate the spread of proven partnership models across countries and sectors – and that doing so is in their own self interest.

National governments can do more to ensure the regulatory and legal conditions that allow partnerships to mature beyond small-scale and localized projects. International donors and institutions can do more to initiate and provide see funding, risk mitigation and other supportive instruments to innovative models. Private sector actors, particularly large corporations, can do more to move beyond traditional patterns of sourcing, production, and distribution and expand their operations to marginalized people and areas. And civil society can do more to play a constructive intermediary role and hold partners accountable to each other and the people.

However, despite all the value they can add to government-led development efforts, partnerships are certainly not a solution for all of Africa’s problems nor do they shift the primary responsibility of progress away from African leaders. But they can certainly help to accelerate progress and help both Africa and Africans fulfill their vast potential.