The Obama Administration has signaled that partnerships are a key component of our foreign policy.   President Obama said in a speech at the Clinton Global Initiative on September 22nd, “Today’s threats demand new partnerships across sectors and across societies—creative collaborations to achieve what no one can accomplish alone.  In short, we need a new spirit of global partnership.”  This policy is reinforced by the appointment of Ambassador Elizabeth Bagley to the position of Special Representative for Global Partnerships.  At Bagley’s swearing-in ceremony in June she said “We are truly all in this together, and we will only succeed by building mutually beneficial partnerships among civil society, the private sector, and the public sector, in order to empower the men and women executing our foreign policy to advance their work through partnerships.”  

I welcome this spirit of global partnerships, but I strongly advise that the administration and foreign assistance agencies develop robust frameworks for measuring the impact of partnerships.  For many agencies the indicators of success in partnership building are simply the number of partners and the dollars leveraged from the private sector, but developing partnerships shouldn’t be the ultimate goal.  Rather, agencies should think of partnerships as a strategy for advancing key agency outcomes like increasing economic empowerment and reducing the incidence of deadly disease.  Thus, valuable indicators should relate to these outcomes and not just the activity of creating partnerships.  Once we understand how much value is created through partnerships we can strategically build high-impact partnerships and continue to advance our foreign policy goals.