New brief explores opportunities for corporate engagement in family planning

There are ample opportunities to engage corporates of all sizes and industries in health programming, including family planning and reproductive health. Many family planning programs already engage corporates that are in the health industry. However, they may not be fully leveraging the opportunities to engage corporates that do not have family planning and reproductive health products or services in their core business offering.

A new SHOPS Plus publication offers lessons learned and tips for donors and implementing partners from its experience engaging corporations outside the health industry on family planning and reproductive health. The publication focuses specifically on engagement with multinational corporations.

Multinational corporations can offer significant resources and opportunities to scale. But especially when they are not in the health industry, it may be challenging for development professionals to figure out how to engage them on family planning and reproductive health. Why would donors and implementing partners engage such actors? Why would the corporates be interested in engaging on this topic, which can be sensitive and even stigmatized? What might they bring to the table? This brief aims to help stakeholders work through this.”

- Stephanie Landers Silva, co-author of the Accelerating Private Sector Engagement: Corporate Engagement brief.

The brief is the third in a series that shares insights from six years of USAID’s flagship initiative in private sector health. Among detailed insights it delves into, three common threads emerge that led to SHOPS Plus’s successful engagement with non-health multinational corporations:

• It is important for development professionals initiating engagement with multinational corporations to be clear about their development objectives while simultaneously building a strong understanding of the corporate actor’s priorities. This enables development professionals to identify shared interests that can form the basis of mutually beneficial collaboration.
• Partnerships require a frequent and purposeful dialogue that brings stakeholders together to converse, share needs and interests, break down barriers, and resolve bottlenecks.
• Engagement is a process and can be valuable even if it does not result in a formal partnership with implemented activities in the near term. Engagement can open communications channels that lead to a partnership later on when the timing or conditions might be better. It can also initiate introductions to other potential partners, as well as inform how you engage other corporate actors in the future.

Read the full brief, Accelerating Private Sector Engagement: Corporate Engagement, here.