3. Move from a donor > grantee dynamic to co-creative partnerships

For future partnerships with business, the FCDO will need to step beyond the donor/ grantee, funder/client dynamic to form peer-to-peer collaborations. Accenture Development Partnerships, co-delivery partner of BP4GG, notes that this will be a necessity as FCDO’s position shifts from being a funder to a facilitator. Partnerships have functioned most effectively on BP4GG where there has been a true sharing of vision, design, risk, and benefit.

Multiple partners commented that, in this spirit, asks from the FCDO need to be proportionate to businesses ability to respond, particularly around regularity of check-ins and the granularity of this reporting. For some on BP4GG, these asks were difficult to manage alongside their own wider delivery pressures and strategic priorities. An intermediary fund manager, when part of delivery, can help by creating feedback between partners, iterating, and finding the right balance of oversight that optimises delivery and collaboration. Partners encourage the use of continual two-way feedback loops to create trust and manage any delivery hurdles. Many business partners felt this has been modelled successfully by NGOs and private sector delivery partners within the BP4GG facility.

Pascale Schuit, Sustainable Sourcing Manager at Union Roasted, echoed other requests that future initiatives ‘strip away the ‘development’ speak’ in meetings’. She observed that such sector-specific language from the FCDO was also compounded by NGO jargon and ‘added a degree of misunderstanding for private sector partners.’ Using such specific terminology can also deter potential partners from getting involved. Several partners noted that the application process for BP4GG was challenging for those potential partners who had no experience of these types of proposals and couldn’t fully understand what was being asked due to the development-specific terms. David Alder and Pablo Martinez from MWW attested that they were among those who found this hard to navigate. Aisha Aswani at Co-Op suggests the FCDO considers how to help potential partners overcome this, such as by allowing business coalitions to submit high-level ideas which can then be co-developed (as was undertaken during the design stage of projects, once selected by BP4GG).

Crucially, Accenture Development Partnerships, observes that FCDO and its delivery intermediaries will need to form strong partnerships by investing in a culture of collaboration and learning. This is critical to making partnerships more than a sum of their parts, especially to draw out the strengths of partnerships.