Inclusive PPP’s: Emerging best practices
This report (PDF), commissioned by the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) has the goal to gain more insight and better understanding of inclusiveness in the public-private partnership (PPP) project portfolio of the Netherlands Sustainable Water Fund (FDW) and the Facility for Sustainable Entrepreneurship and Food Security (FDOV). This will contribute to increased insights into specific characteristics of the beneficiaries and target groups and possible trickle-down or indirect effects. There are 7 best practices to reach inclusiveness to be learned from the study: 1) Access to finance should be made inclusive. 2) There should be dedicated steering towards inclusiveness results. 3) Projects should be tailored to specific target groups throughout the project cycle. 4) Sustaining capacity-building efforts for low-income groups who cannot afford capacity building on their own. 5) The strength of the broader community should be used for better inclusiveness. 6) Composition of the right partnerships with a genuine interest in inclusiveness. 7) Getting the message across and the target group on board to secure their interest and cooperation. Measuring indirect effects receives little to no attention during project implementation. The logic of these effects remain implicit and is often not articulated in a theory of change/results framework. A recommendation concerning the portfolio of FDW and FDOV would be to lower the “entry barriers” to submitting an application, and carefully look at the role of private and public partners in such setting. Recommended is to use a set of indicators for change (sings of inclusiveness) that provide a framework to understand how PPPs can provide their products, services or practices in an inclusive way, while also making business sense. This frameworks consists of 5 A’s: Affordability, Awareness, Availability, Acceptability and Advantage. Good practices can be found in the following areas: the design of the technical approach, shaping the implementation arrangement and the management of interventions. Each ‘best practice’ has to be tailored to the specific nature and context of the individual intervention.
To ensure the best practices identified are not only shared in the report itself, but get a broader reach, a webinar was organized by BopInc highlighting the key observations from the report, illustrated by some of the project examples from the report. A recording of this webinar can be found here.