NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

WASHINGTON — When USAID administrator Rajiv Shah announced more than $600 million in new partnerships with private organizations last month, including giant multinationals Coca-Cola and Johnson & Johnson, the news was heralded in Washington as another stride in the agency’s path to ending preventable child and maternal mortality.

Shah’s June 25 announcement was another dramatic example of the administration’s signature embrace of private enterprise to help solve some of the most pressing global health crises. As Shah put it in remarks published on the agency’s website, “We cannot go at it alone.”

“These partnerships do more than mobilize more resources,” wrote Shah, 41, a Wharton School of Business graduate who has been a rising star in the White House. “They guarantee that American tax dollars are delivering extraordinary outcomes in challenging places.

As government cuts have threatened foreign aid budgets, Shah’s more than four-year tenure at USAID, the US Agency for International Development, has been sharply defined by such collaboration with the private sector through arrangements known as public-private partnerships, or PPPs. As he said in a speech last fall, PPPs “form the foundation of a more strategic and smarter approach to development.”