Public-Private Engagement

Public-private engagement in health is the mutually beneficial collaboration between public and private health sector entities for the purpose of advancing public health goals and achieving sustainable health outcomes. The ultimate goal of public-private engagement is to facilitate integration, reduce inefficiencies, and strategically use both public and private resources.

Public-private engagement on SHOPS Plus takes many shapes and forms depending on country context and local needs. These span a wide range of activities, from supporting NGOs in the Dominican Republic to contract with the public national health insurance scheme for a sustainable HIV response, to increasing private providers’ access to government training and family planning commodities in Nigeria, to facilitating data sharing between private pharmacies and the Kenyan government via the District Health Information System 2 (DHIS2). Across all the project’s country work, four key components of public-private engagement emerge:

• Ensuring availability and use of high quality information on the private health sector
• Building the capacity of the government to effectively engage, partner with, and steward the private health sector
• Facilitating a dialogue process that brings all stakeholders together to overcome mistrust, agree on policy agendas, and identify specific partnership opportunities.
• Fostering an environment of mutual trust and accountability
• Strengthening the private health sector to have a strong, unified voice
• Convening public and private sector stakeholders to improve dialogue and resolve bottlenecks

Examples of our work

SHOPS Plus conducted a 32-country scan to document the legislation, policies, and regulations that currently affect the types of family planning methods pharmacies and drug shops can provide and how they provide them to help family planning stakeholders—including donors, governments, and implementing partners—to contextualize barriers for policy reforms.

Country highlights

In Senegal, SHOPS Plus helps increase public private engagement by:

• Supporting the Ministry of Health to identify, manage, and implement PPPs by developing tools to evaluate potential partnership opportunities and training materials for government staff on PPP selection and implementation
• Conducting training of public and private sector actors on PPPs
• Supporting legal and regulatory measures to improve private sector adherence to policies and regulations.
• Publishing a private sector mapping report that is helping the government of Senegal, donors, and the private sector to identify challenges in private sector service delivery, staffing, and financing.

In Madagascar, SHOPS Plus helps increase public private engagement by:

• Conducting a private sector mapping to better understand the geographic distribution of private providers and their concerns
• Conducting a Private Sector Assessment to understand the obstacles and opportunities of engagement with the private health sector
• Supporting the Ministry of Health to improve private sector reporting into the national health information system
• Supporting public-private dialogue through dialogue forums as well as helping create private sector organizations such as the Private Hospital Association and the Federation of Mutuelles

Countries: Dominican Republic (Increasing Insurance Enrollment, Private Participation), Eastern and Southern Caribbean (Pride Fund, Generated Best Practices, Country-led Engagement)  Madagascar, Nigeria (Diarrhea Treatment, FP Provision) Senegal (Performance Assessments, Public Stewardship), Tanzania