Academic and private sector expertise to strengthen Alliance programmes
27 March 2008
The Alliance has launched a new initiative to develop capacity building partnerships with the private sector and academia. The new ‘Private sector partnerships’ team based at the Alliance secretariat will initially look at ways in which to bring in partners from the corporate sector to support Alliance country offices and linking organisations to develop their organisational and management infrastructure.
The Alliance hopes to use the partnerships to build the institutional capacity of fast growing organisations across the Alliance in areas such as management, organisational development and governance, HR and IT. This will support the scale up of their work by providing organisational sustainability. The benefit to private sector partners will be realised through staff experience in a new sector, familiarity with the working cultures of new country markets, and the potential to document stories for internal and external use. The expectation is that this may lead to longer term partnerships with key private sector partners.
The first project to commence will be a collaboration between the Alliance, the leading graduate business school INSEAD in France, and ten corporate enterprises. The partnership will see ten Alliance organisations each partnered with a mentor from a corporate enterprise for one year, learning from their business experience and INSEAD’s business school methodologies. INSEAD will provide leadership training for senior managers from the participating Alliance organisations and their corporate partners, as well as research and documentation of the year long programme. We intend to launch the programme in October of this year.
