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A few weeks ago I was woken up by a regional nurse calling to invite a few members of the GB staff in Honduras to the first NGO partnership meeting at the Regional Health Center in El Paraiso. While I was surprised and pleased to receive this call and see first-hand the intention of the governmental health system reaching out to collaborate with private entities, it also made me think critically about the term “partnerships” and the role and reality partnerships take on.
Millennium Development Goal #8: Develop a Global Partnership for Development. Partnerships must be important then, right? To some extent, you must agree. Debt reliefs, access to generic drugs, and information and technology sharing have been central issues that have required partnership-building. When we talk about sustainability, it’s essential to discuss the relationship between NGO and government institutions. NGOs depend on government systems for sustainability, since governments are the entity that will forever be responsible and accountable for the health and well being of its citizens.
But what happens when a government fails or faces corruption? Or when a serious natural catastrophe occurs? This is when the public sector depends on NGOs. Take the case of Honduras. This last summer 2009, most external funding from USAID, World Bank, and IMF that filters through the government health programs was suspended due to the June 28th “coup,” causing government-supported programs to cease from July through January. In 1998, during Hurricane Mitch, external funding was necessary to help alleviate the disaster that ensued. This is when a culture of “brigades” from foreign-funded organizations was born in Honduras…and what’s the result now? Hundreds of NGOs initiated during this time that did their very best individually to aid communities in Honduras, but that were not accustomed to working in collaboration with one another. This is now one of the main missions of Project Honduras, an initiative to facilitate communication between organizations and businesses working internationally in Honduras (www.projecthonduras.org).
Partnerships are inevitable—we are a global community made of relationships and collaborations because we know one organization cannot do it all. But I’d like us to brainstorm what are the benefits and drawbacks of building partnerships. For all you biology majors, when would a partnership potentially become “parasitic” instead of “symbiotic”? One-sided instead of mutual? Dare I say, “North” to “South”?
Some benefits are the awareness of other organizations’ work, avoiding duplicating the same work and pooling and targeting financial and staff resources. Potential drawbacks could be having to adapt to the particular limitations of a certain organization, perhaps religiously- or politically-affiliated, or falling into power struggles between the financing versus the implementing partner.
What do YOU think makes a good partnership? What are potential benefits and drawbacks? What can organizations do to ensure that a partnership, be it public-private or private-private, will be mutually beneficial? What are key differences between building partnerships at the local level versus building partnerships at the national or global level?
