Manage the “What Ifs?” of Government Partnerships

Even with the best laid plans, unexpected challenges will arise as you partner with government. The enterprises we interviewed emphasized the importance of being clear about values, training staff on policies for addressing challenges, and creating scenario plans as challenges inevitably occur. Here we summarize advice from these enterprises on some of the most common challenges. As we heard from members of USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures Team, never stop asking, “What if?”

1. What if you are faced with corruption?
   We heard the same advice repeatedly and emphatically from interviewees: Never engage. Be transparent that you will never engage and report when corruption does happen. When working with government, an enterprise will likely face corruption, either overtly or covertly, including requests for bribes, pressure from government agents to hire relatives or friends, and more. Water and Sanitation for the Poor’s (WSUP) India Country Program Manager, Akhilesh Gautam, warns, “Your reputation is critical, so [when corruption presents] you must retreat in the short term, hold off for the long term, and find the right partners” that will engage in the work with you ethically. The advice from Elizabeth Hausler, Founder and CEO of Build Change, was to understand where the possibilities for corruption are, who stands to benefit, and how you might structure your work to limit opportunities for corruption. Build Change’s solution is to bypass cash allocations to contractors — where the bulk of corruption tends to occur — and ensure funds are given directly to the homeowners who are most likely to use the funds for improvements related to their families’ safety and productivity.
2. What if your government partners change?
   They will, so be ready! Government partnerships are inherently unstable due to changes in political parties, elections, turnover, and strife — and in the case of our interviewees, coups, civil war, and high-level officials being jailed. So, do not put too many eggs in one basket. Make connections at multiple levels or departments; think about building relationships not only with political appointees but also those in civil service and the technical experts who often remain through political party transitions; and always stay above the political fray by remaining a neutral party. Imazon deeply engages with government at all levels to implement forest monitoring protocols, and its political neutrality is a key piece of its value proposition. Amintas Brandao, Jr., Imazon Adjunct Researcher, explains: “We have had the benefit of being neutral politically and, as a third party, many see us as more credible. Imazon’s reports cannot be held back by a political issue of the moment, for example.” Pratham’s approach of working with all levels of the state education system helps ensure that its methodology continues to be adopted even when political parties change. It shared an example of a change in state government that led to new leadership less committed to championing Pratham’s work. Nevertheless, the impact that Pratham pioneered with the previous government was already embedded and championed at the lower levels within the state, which led to these educators and administrators continuing to accept Pratham as a key collaborator.
3. What if government partners want to take over your Intellectual Property?
   Many social enterprises have Intellectual Property (IP) they want to protect — either because they want to continue to scale their own solution, or because they are a for-profit company and IP is their lifeline. We heard stories of social enterprises working toward government endorsement of a product or toward a contract — but who encountered challenges when the government partner began to see itself as part owners of the product. While IP protection is tricky in any industry, interviewees recommended being very clear from the beginning about partnership goals and product intentions, taking the time to find the right long-term partner, and structuring engagement upfront in a way that aligns and protects these goals.
4. What if you are perceived to have conflicts of interest?
   It is not uncommon to face issues around conflict of interest — whether real or perceived. Last Mile Health serves as both an implementer in the field and an advisor to the Ministry of Health, with each role complementing and increasing impact of the other. However, some have perceived them to have a conflict when advising the MOH on resource allocation, since their field programs could stand to benefit. LMH worked diligently to prove that it was tackling its work from an ecosystem-building approach so as to offset those perceptions. Build Change avoids perceived conflicts of interest by deferring to the local government on the selection of neighborhoods in which it will work. While this means that Build Change may have to physically move the focus of its work when regimes change, it is able to avoid any perceived favoritism or alignment with a political party.
5. What if government partners slow you down?
   Change can happen more slowly when partnering with government, so enterprises must determine whether the potential upsides of working with government outweigh the costs. VillageReach has begun to put in significant time at the beginning of a project to develop a transition toolkit with its government partners and has found that the up-front investment pays off in accelerating the work as it is implemented. VillageReach and others also report placing secondees in relevant government offices to act as champions and help accelerate change. Survey respondents reported additional strategies, such as entering into non-financial agreements to reduce chances of delays in project approvals, and incentivizing agencies by bringing matching funds, additional manpower, or other resources that “we can combine with theirs in order to get a backlog or something else cleared that is in the way.”
6. What if partners feel threatened by your disruption of the status quo.
   Innovation means disrupting the status quo, which can be scary — especially for risk-averse governments. A key job of many social enterprises is to de-risk new approaches for the government — often done through small pilots and initial scale-up. VillageReach recognized that much of the work it was implementing around the health commodity supply chain was a departure from the status quo — which was not an issue when VillageReach was running the program but became an issue when it began to plan for government adoption of the program. The VillageReach team had to stop and consider the incentives and systems constraints of the government and adapt both the program and the way in which it was framed (e.g., new way of achieving policy objectives) in order to make adoption easier and less uncomfortable. As Pratham has found, identifying opportunities for small, incremental change over time can be an effective way to scale within a large, complex system. Pratham CEO Rukmini Banerji noted that “[You] improve in small jumps most of the time, and only sometimes do you take big leaps.”
7. What if your government partnership is successful?
   If an enterprise is in the fortunate position of achieving success scaling impact by leveraging a government partnership, what can it do next to build on that momentum? It can use policymakers from that successful partnership to generate buy-in from policymaker peers in other countries, as Fundación Capital does. Enterprises can package their approach for government partners in other locations to use, as WSUP India is doing by packaging its urban sanitation approach into a toolkit (“SBM In a Box”) to share with municipalities where WSUP does not have the funding to engage. Enterprises can also continue to go deeper in their work with that government partner, taking on more and more complex challenges as Partners In Health does with health systems strengthening in Rwanda and Build Change does with moving from post-disaster reconstruction to pre-disaster prevention in a number of countries.

Results from Scaling Pathways survey

Read next: Key Takeaways: Checklist for Government Partnerships, Proactively manage — or avoid — politics, or return to see all articles in Government Partners.

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This article was written by Erin Worsham, Kimberly Langsam, and Ellen Martin, and released in September 2018.