A public-private partnership under Feed the Future is a formal collaboration between public (us) and private (you) sectors that involves a commitment of resources from both sides and jointly addresses business and development objectives.
Through a joint development venture in an area pertinent to food security, Feed the Future and your business (plus other partners, if applicable) create a public good—such as improved irrigation, seed research, advanced communications, or post-harvest market access—that helps transform the agriculture sector in a developing country or region. The partnership simultaneously helps move your business forward. Through collaboration, we can have a greater impact on your bottom line and our development goals than if we worked alone.
That being said, our resources are limited, so we can’t partner with everyone. Instead, we utilize public resources to support partnership ideas that have the greatest impact on advancing our development goals. For Feed the Future, that means reducing poverty, hunger and undernutrition in our focus countries and ensuring smallholder farmers, particularly women, benefit.
Learn more about the initiative on our About page.
You can look at Feed the Future public-private partnerships as a Build-Operate-Transfer model, a form many, though not all, take. Within our development strategies, Feed the Future pairs what we bring to the table with your financial and technical resources to build a project and provide support for entrepreneurs to operate that project in a developing country. We co-design, co-fund and co-implement the project, sharing the risks, responsibilities and results.
Feed the Future aims to build long-term food security and stimulate broad-based, long-lasting economic growth, which host countries ultimately own and lead. To support these goals, during the build and operate phase partnerships help grow local capacity and markets, enhancing the likelihood that a sustainable, market-driven private equity business will remain even after public funding ends (which it will). Public-private partnerships often involve other resource and implementing partners too, such as civil society and research institutions, further increasing the likelihood of project sustainability.
As a whole-of-government initiative, Feed the Future leverages the strengths of agencies across the U.S. Government, capitalizing on the resources and expertise of:
What does the U.S. Government bring to a partnership?
What does the U.S. Government bring to a partnership?
What do private sector partners bring to a partnership?
What do private sector partners bring to a partnership?
