For collaboration to contribute at scale to the SDGs, significant investment in the overall enabling infrastructure, capacity and environment for partnering is required By Darian Stibbe, Executive Director Collaboration across societal sectors has emerged as one of the defining concepts of international development in the 21st Century. Initially a response to the limitations of traditional state-led, […]

Getting your own organisation behind a partnership is where most of the hard work lies. Building internal alignment is difficult for at least two reasons: structures, and individuals. Organisational structures can either actively support or strongly block collaborative efforts. And then there’s the human beings.

While significant progress has undoubtedly been made in some areas of business / public health relations (notably in the area of infectious disease control), it is surely time to break this us-and-them deadlock when it comes to combatting NCDs. Unless we urgently seek a more productive basis for private sector engagement, we will collectively fail to meet the SDGs.

Two years after the adoption of the Global Goals (also called the Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs), there are still too few champions, ambassadors and implementers of this ambitious agenda. There are also too few partnerships for the goals being showcased, to inspire others and invite further action.