Over the past decade, donors across the board have been increasingly leveraging public-private partnerships as a tool to maximize the impact and increase the sustainability of their aid programming. In the global development context, PPPs are broadly defined as arrangements in which the public and private sectors combine resources and expertise to achieve development objectives.
The world’s biggest bilateral donor, the U.S. Agency for the International Development was one of the first development agencies to embed PPPs into its foreign assistance model — a move that prompted praise from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
PPPs were first integrated into the business systems of USAID in 2001, when the Bush administration created the Global Development Alliance initiative. Amid intense pressures on U.S. aid spending, the Obama administration’s USAID Forward reform agenda has set a goal of increasing PPP investments further to 10 percent of USAID mission program funding by fiscal 2015.