The year 2020 will certainly go down as one of the most unprecedented years in recent history, with the COVID-19 pandemic altering the lives and livelihoods of people across the world and turning what was meant to be the start of the most productive decade on the Sustainable Development Goals into a backslide in human development progress for the first time since 1990.
In May 2020, in the midst of this uncertainty and disruption, Goal 17 Partners, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, brainstormed about ways to engage the private sector around the Gavi replenishment and the push for an effective and equitable global rollout of a COVID-19 vaccine—a vaccine that was, at that point, still an uncertainty. We realized that the unique moment in time, with the urgency and complexity it imparted on our collective goals and work, offered an opening to take a fresh look at the global health and sustainable development ecosystem and how it engages the private sector in its work. While many of us had our heads down addressing the pressing new challenges, we also wanted to take a step back and learn. We set out to harness the learnings and positive changes caused by this moment’s disruption and developed a project, “Harnessing the Private Sector to Build Back Better.”
Conducted over a three-month period in the fall and early winter of 2020, this effort resulted in two products: a landscape analysis “Reimagining Private Sector Partnerships in a COVID-19 World,” with resulting recommendations and a complementary playbook, “Think Bigger: The Power of Partnerships.” Both products have been developed as tools to benefit the ecosystem the project engaged and contribute to strengthening the next generation of private sector partnerships. We look forward to using them to catalyze discussion and action.
As 2021 moves forward and the world turns the page on what has been a dark moment of history, albeit marked by incredible bright spots of innovation, resilience and collaboration, will we harness those bright spots as opportunities to work better together in the future? We believe the answer is yes, and we hope this work can help guide us along that journey.
Download your copy of the landscape analysis and playbook here: