But what do these public-private partnerships (PPPs) look like in practice? I put this question to Laura Hosman, assistant professor of political science at the Illinois Institute of Technology, United States, who specialises in ICT for development (ICT4D) and such partnerships.
"There's certainly no cookie-cutter partnership format. It can be two partners, it can be ten, it can be very small projects, it can be mammoth projects," she says.
Hosman cites three ongoing examples.
- The first is a large-scale collaboration between Microsoft, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Kenyan government to build the first energy-neutral building.
- Another project — a nationwide partnership involving both big players (Inveneo, an ICT-focused non-profit; the US Agency for International Development; and Ethiopia's education ministry) and multiple smaller partners — is seeking to boost literacy levels in Ethiopian primary schools.
- Finally, Inveneo, the University of California, San Francisco, and Kenyan NGO Organic Health Response are working together on a small-scale project to establish a long-distance WiFi link to a hospital on a remote island in the middle of Lake Victoria.
But working out how to scale up ICT4D projects has been a struggle — and Hosman says there are two main barriers.
"The first is that … in order for [scaled-up projects] to be successful they actually have to be tailored to the local places [where] they are being deployed.
"The systems that work for the Silicon Valley might not work in the Rift Valley."
---
Autor(en)/Author(s): Naomi Martin
Quelle/Source: SciDev.Net, 15.08.2013
Bitte besuchen Sie/Please visit:
