Impact in international development requires meaningful partnerships

Partnerships in international development are not a nice-to-have, they are critical to drive impact.

There are currently 15 specialised United Nations (UN) agencies, and 5,451 officially registered NGOs with a consultative status with the UN. Global and regional multilateral development banks and bilateral development agencies and banks, foundations and private sector companies, as well as millions of national and local NGOs add to a complex international development architecture.

How can all of these organisations ensure that they are driving impact for the people and planet that they are mandated to serve? How can they best drive impact at scale, using scarce resources and capacity efficiently, and ensure that their policies and programs do not duplicate or contradict each other?

Working in partnership is a key means to deliver on coherent policy recommendations, funding, and programs – and critical for achieving impact.

Investing in partnerships can increase the impact of an organisation by:

• Tapping into diverse expertise and information sources
• Enabling better division of labour
• Reaping efficiencies
• Achieving economies of scale
• Providing support in times of crisis, and
• Ensuring policy and implementation coherence.

So why do so many organisations struggle with partnerships? Many organisations:

• Have identified high-profile strategic partners, but struggle to engage and deliver on objectives due to different organisational cultures or cycles
• Lack the capacity to map, prioritise and engage meaningfully with partners
• Struggle to identify strategic partnerships
• Fear competition and lack the expertise and tools to mitigate risks
• Have incentives that focus leadership and staff attention inwards
• Do not have partnership criteria, or a partnership process in place, including an exit strategy when needed.

Partners for Impact (PFI) aims to bring together best practices from research and experts working in partnership, and also offers tailored services to organisations that would like to improve their understanding of what working in partnership means in practice, what the benefits and challenges are, and how to practically move forward partnerships to achieve more impact.

The mission of PFI is to ensure that development organisations achieve more impact through their partnerships. Find out more about PFI’s work and focus.