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21. Equity and Quality in an Education Public-Private Partnership: A study of the World Bank-supported PPP in Punjab, Pakistan

Author:
Momina Afraid
Publication Date:
08-2018
Content Type:
Research Paper
Institution:
Oxfam Publishing
Abstract:
Public-private partnerships (PPPs) in education are increasing in profile as countries grapple with serious challenges of educational access and quality—and as donors such as the World Bank turn to this approach as they advise countries on potential solutions to these barriers. Evidence is still limited on the impacts of this policy approach, however, and the academic literature that looks at equity and inclusion raises profound concerns. This study seeks to understand the impact of the PPP initiative in Punjab province, Pakistan, on key dimensions of equity, education quality, and democratic and social accountability. It was conducted over a period of two months, through field visits in a sample of 31 schools across five districts of the province (in both rural and urban/slum areas) and all four programs run by the Punjab Education Foundation (PEF). The study provides an in-depth view of how the sample schools are operating and are incentivized within the framework of the PEF programs, raising serious concerns about equity, quality, and accountability that need to be considered more broadly in the push to expand PPPs.
Topic:
Education, International Cooperation, World Bank, Public Sector, and Private Sector
Political Geography:
Global Focus

22. Can the private sector help address the global refugee crisis?

Author:
Ammar A. Malik and Janet Malzahn
Publication Date:
11-2018
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
Urban Institute
Abstract:
As the global refugee crisis persists, refugees continue to leave war-ravaged countries and increase the strain on the world’s philanthropic sector. Conflicts and instability have expelled more than 68 million men, women, and children from their homes. With widening funding gaps and no resolution in sight, the international humanitarian system must tap into new sources of funding, resources, and expertise to care for the expanding population of displaced people. The private sector can, and should, help address this crisis. By partnering with humanitarian organizations, for-profit companies offer a unique perspective and wealth of resources to help refugees. These socially responsible partnerships, which we've documented and cataloged, engage the private sector in humanitarian efforts by giving them the opportunity to generate gains for their business while also producing value for refugees by joining with mission-driven non-profits. These partnerships are more likely to provide meaningful and ongoing help to refugees if they are profitable for businesses.
Topic:
Development, Humanitarian Aid, Refugee Crisis, and Private Sector
Political Geography:
Global Focus

23. The Private Turn in Humanitarian Aid

Author:
Jose Montesclaros and Christopher Chen
Publication Date:
10-2018
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
Centre for Non-Traditional Security Studies, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies
Abstract:
To bridge funding gaps in humanitarian assistance, states will need to re-examine their roles, relative to the private sector. Humanitarian technologies offer a potential highvolume, low-profit margin sector which can be an entry point for private companies.
Topic:
Humanitarian Aid, Science and Technology, Business, Private Sector, and Funding
Political Geography:
Global Focus

24. Oxfam’s Future of Business Initiative: Promoting Equitable Businesses and Fourth Sector Development

Author:
Oxfam Publishing
Publication Date:
09-2017
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Oxfam Publishing
Abstract:
Since the turn of the century, the poorest half of the world’s population has received just 1% of the total increase in global wealth. Meanwhile, half the new wealth has gone to the richest 1%. At present, mainstream business is driving, rather than reversing, this disturbing trend. To help reverse this trend, we need rapid growth of equitable business structures with purpose, fairness and sustainability embedded into their model. In efforts to promote such equitable business structures, and the fourth sector, Oxfam is launching the Future of Business Initiative. Through this initiative, Oxfam will help such enterprises access finance and work with global companies on how they can include them in their supply chains. Oxfam will also investigate how having more businesses structured more equitably can contribute towards tackling global inequality, and ways government policies can better foster them, and the broader fourth sector.
Topic:
Development, Poverty, Labor Issues, Private Sector, and Equity
Political Geography:
Global Focus

25. Creating Value Through the Chain: SABMiller & the Tenderos

Author:
Shashank Aeri and Trevor N. May
Publication Date:
01-2016
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Institute for the Study of International Development, McGill University (ISID)
Abstract:
Launched in 2013, the “4e Camino al Progreso” program is an Inter-American Development Bank/Multilateral Investment Fund-sponsored social investment project led by SABMiller and implemented by the executing agency FUNDES in six Latin American countries. Capitalizing on the opportunities inherent in the brewer’s value chain, the initiative provides business and leadership consulting to small retailers, known as tenderos, in impoverished neighbourhoods. The project aims to improve the profitability and sustainability of the stores, or tiendas, allowing their proprietors to achieve a better quality of life and contribute more time and resources to improving their communities. Empowering these retailers to become better business operators ultimately strengthens SABMiller and other companies’ distribution network, creating benefits for the local and regional economy. The case presents a promising model for similar corporate-social partnerships and contains innovative examples of how the private sector can contribute to substantive development initiatives. Given the partnership’s variegated players and contacts, the case highlights stakeholder relations strategies and challenges. The project’s design also demonstrates scalability and sustainability potential, although the ultimate success of these ambitions will depend on strategic decision-making and managing SABMiller’s evolution as it merges with Anheuser Busch InBev, the world’s largest brewer. 1 While its ultimate results remain to be seen, this project raises three main lessons given its progress to date: first, sometimes even the most obvious solutions, such as using technology, do not come with an equally straightforward technique for adoption and implementation; second, reconceptualising the bottom of the pyramid as an engine of growth in the value chain, rather than simply a group of undervalued consumers; and third, understanding how productivity and efficiency contribute to sustainability, which may be undermined if this relationship is not recognized.
Topic:
Development, Business, Investment, and Private Sector
Political Geography:
Global Focus

26. Assessing Business-Related Impacts on Human Rights

Author:
Dyan Tromp
Publication Date:
01-2016
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Institute for Development and Peace
Abstract:
With a view to informing the policies and practices of states, business enterprises, and other stakeholders towards universal corporate respect for human rights, this study proposes principled and practical indicators to support the assessment of human rights impacts with which business enterprises may be involved. The study identifies a wide array of contexts in which application of the proposed indicators would help to strengthen state approaches to protecting rights-holders against business-related harm in terms of law, policy, regulation, adjudication and participation in multilateral, international and regional organizations. The study also presents a practical methodology for how the proposed indicators can strengthen current private sector approaches to implementing the corporate responsibility to respect human rights, particularly in terms of assessing the human rights risks and impacts that may be associated with core business operations and business relationships.
Topic:
Human Rights, Business, Regionalism, and Private Sector
Political Geography:
Global Focus

27. Economics and the Near-Death Experience of Democratic Governance

Author:
June Sekera
Publication Date:
05-2015
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University
Abstract:
Non-market public production makes up a quarter to a half or more of all economic activity in advanced democratic nation-states. Yet here in the United States the public economy’s ability to function productively on behalf of the citizenry is seriously imperiled. In this paper I trace the connection between mainstream, market-centric economics and what James Galbraith has called “the collapse of the public governing capacity.” Marketization and its confederate, privatization, have led, sometimes intentionally, to the evisceration of governmental capacity, the downsizing of democracy and the dismantling of traditions of responsible public administration that are grounded in law and the Constitution. Over the last decades, apostles of the market have intruded upon government a pseudo-market with outcomes ranging from the unfortunate to the disastrous. So-called “New Public Management” –“a child of neoclassical economics,” – has colonized and weakened every level of public administration. Hollowed out through the cathartic of a “competition prescription,” the public sector time and again seems to fail us, so systems of performance measurement transplanted from profit-driven business models are being imposed across government, ostensibly to improve results and better supply what the populace wants and needs, but instead often leaving harm in their wake. We find our most basic public services and rights in jeopardy: from clean air and water to unencumbered judicial due process. While government “reinventors” boast about shrinking government, in reality a “submerged state” mushrooms through an explosion of private profit- making contractors and behind the hidden hand of tax expenditures. Yet, as I argue in this paper, there is no viable explanatory theory of the public non-market economy or of production within it, nor any consensus about how to measure public purpose or assess results in the public domain. Instead, a market-centric economics prevails in textbooks, university teaching and public policy, while private, market-mimicking motivations and values displace public purpose in measurement schemes.
Topic:
Governance, Democracy, Public Sector, Private Sector, and Non-Market Economy
Political Geography:
Global Focus

28. Board Gender Diversity, Audit Fees and Auditor Choice

Author:
Judy Tsui
Publication Date:
04-2015
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)
Abstract:
Using a sample of U.S. firms spanning 2001-2011, we examine whether female directors (female audit committee members) affect audit quality in terms of audit effort and auditor choice. After correcting for endogeneity and other board, firm and industry characteristics, we find that firms with gender-diverse boards pay higher audit fees and are more likely to choose specialist auditors compared to their peers. Our findings suggest that boards with female directors are likely to demand higher audit quality, ceteris paribus.
Topic:
Economics, Gender Issues, Race, Culture, Inequality, Diversity, Private Sector, and Audit
Political Geography:
Global Focus

29. A new development era? The private sector moves to the centre

Author:
Evan Mawdsley
Publication Date:
09-2014
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Norwegian Centre for Conflict Resolution
Abstract:
The last few years have witnessed the emergence of a loose but potent assemblage of ideas that have all but supplanted the recent “aid effectiveness” agenda. “Development effectiveness”, to use a term that became popular at the 2011 Busan High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, recentres economic growth as the principal engine of international development and foregrounds the private sector as the central driver of this growth. The concerns of good governance, social welfare and poverty reduction are not going to disappear, but their place in the sequencing and focus of many development actors and institutions is changing. Intertwined with this process is the rearticulation of foreign aid (official development assistance) as a catalyst for development, and the growing use of “blended” public and private finances to support investment and growth. If this growing trend in international development thinking and practice is to have genuine development outcomes, then (1) private-sector-led policies and programmes must actively engage with win-lose scenarios and not just assume win-win scenarios; and (2) the quality and not just quantity of economic growth must be supported by the articulation of clear and credible principles, institutional structures, and appropriate metrics and incentive mechanisms, and not simply aspirational statements.
Topic:
Development, Humanitarian Aid, Economic Growth, and Private Sector
Political Geography:
Global Focus

30. Public-Private Partnerships for Development: A Handbook for Business

Author:
Suezan C. Lee
Publication Date:
07-2006
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
The Conference Board
Abstract:
CED partnered with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) on this handbook, published in 2006, which is designed to help businesses operating in developing countries understand how to build public-private partnerships that will benefit their host country populations and the participating firms.
Topic:
International Trade and Finance, Partnerships, Business, Public Sector, Economic Development, and Private Sector
Political Geography:
Global Focus and United States of America