This study examines ways of engaging business in development through Public Private Partnerships (PPP). It highlights areas of best practice and likely advances for the partnership tool in development assistance, potential avenues for future research and possibilities for enhanced donor collaboration. To do so the study adopted a collaborative benchmarking approach, building  a network of benchmarking partners who intend to learn from each other.

The study  includes six donors: Canada (CIDA), Denmark (Danida), Germany (BMZ), The Netherlands (DGIS), the UK (DFID) and the USA (USAID), and  finds that donors have developed a variety of different approaches to building partnerships with the business community. These approaches can be grouped into three basic partnership models:

• Probing Business Opportunities (PBO)
• Fostering Sustainable Business (FSB)
• Corporate Development Responsibility (CDR)

None of the three programme models is necessarily superior to the others, rather, each pursues quite distinctive objectives in an attempt to capitalise on different areas in which the interests of donors and companies intersect.

Despite the diversity of programme models, four general conclusions can be drawn:

• Partnership programmes that are focused on engaging business in technical development cooperation are just one of manifold ways in which development agencies can leverage the resources and expertise of the business community to address global development challenges
• Partnership programmes need to manage a fine balance between a sufficiently flexilbe design in and the close alignment of the partnerships with overall donor development strategies
• Contrary to the general trend in bilateral development cooperation to design programmes that generate structural impacts at either the meso- or macro-levels, the partnership programmes surveyed in this benchmarking report operate primarily at the micro-level. However, that does not imply that partnership projects cannot generate second-order effects: Moreover, micro-level projects still have an important contribution to make, especially when they establish models that can be replicated or scaled up
• While some donors have made initial strides into evaluation, so far only very little is known about the development impact of partnership programmes. One way to address some of these challenges is through enhanced donor collaboration.