How can donors engage with non-state providers?
Mapping of donors’ policies and approaches towards non-state service providers
How do donors work with private and NGO providers of health, education, water and sanitation?
Authors:
E. Wakefield
Publisher:
International Development Department, University of Birmingham, 2004
This document provides an overview of donor agencies’ policies towards non-state service providers (NSPs) and the main approaches that they advocate for engaging with them. It is accompanied by an Annex which contains profiles of individual donors’ policies. It reports that none of the donors surveyed have general, cross-sectoral policies on engaging with non-state service providers. Explicit policies, where they exist, are sector-specific.
However, certain agencies such as the Asian Development Bank (ADB), USAID, and the World Bank strongly favour engaging with NSPs across all sectors reviewed, whereas the Swedish development agency Sida currently takes a relatively cautious approach to NSPs across all sectors. Most donors contribute a mixture of financial and technical assistance in support of their policies on NSP, although they use a variety of methods to engage with or promote NSP in partner countries.
In the education sector, all donors recognise the important role played by NSPs in supplementing government provision of basic education and donor policies include a variety of different ways of engaging them. However, donors are more reticent than in other sectors to suggest that governments consider withdrawal from direct provision of education services.
In the water and sanitation sectors, the World Bank, ADB and the German agency GTZ strongly support the involvement of the private sector in urban water supply infrastructure and suggest a variety of mechanisms by which this can be achieved. Smaller-scale partnerships are also considered appropriate by many donors for financing, running and monitoring water supply systems, especially in rural, small town and peri-urban areas.
In health, the World Bank and ADB advocate that governments actively consider purchasing health services from NGOs and civil society providers. The World Bank, GTZ and Sida, are currently undertaking research on how the private sector can be better integrated in future health systems development.
