Global Health Partnerships: Governance, Leadership, and Organizational Reform

The past decades have seen the rise of international partnership between the public and private sectors to address grand challenges encountered in the provision of health services and access to medicines in developing countries. This paper reviews the governance aspects of this relationship and provides insight into how these multi-stakeholder alliances function and have evolved. In particular, we will be focusing on two prominent formally established organizations, namely: The Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI). The paper examines how these enterprises managed to overcome divergent viewpoints and cultural differences, the control and risk management of programs in resource-strapped environments, and how reform has improved the efficiency of these social enterprises. This multi-stakeholder approach aims to bring together the stakeholders in a new form of consensus-building and decision-making. Despite their common purpose to save lives, the proliferation of actors in public-private partnerships requires leadership skills that are different from managing private or public enterprises separately.