The Office of Global Partnerships at the U.S. Department of State, Concordia, and the University of Virginia Darden School’s Institute for Business in Society have announced the five finalists for the 2023 P3 Impact Award.
According to a statement released by the State Department today, this award recognizes exemplary public-private partnerships (P3s) that provide solutions to pressing global issues such as improving access to education and quality healthcare, women’s economic empowerment and humanitarian assistance.
An independent and diverse judging committee selected the following five finalists for the 2023 Award based on the operational structure, measurable social-inclusion impact, financial sustainability, innovation, and scalability of the partnerships:
The HealthTech Hub Africa – Pan-Africa
The HealthTech Hub Africa (HTHA) includes the primary partners: the Novartis Foundation, Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Bridge for Billions, the Norrsken Foundation, and the Centre for Fourth Industrial Revolution Rwanda.
HTHA is a hybrid pan-African health tech accelerator working to drive development of health technologies in Africa and fast-track these innovations in public health systems through collaboration with government partners.
By doing so, it aims to help African governments tackle their largest health challenges, particularly those faced by low-income and underserved populations. HTHA is unique in its dual mission – focused on meeting the needs of both entrepreneurs and governments as they collectively work to advance health equity.
Quality Education India Development Impact Bond – India
The Quality Education India DIB (QEI DIB) in 2018 was created by the British Asian Trust (BAT), Michael & Susan Dell Foundation (MSDF), UBS Optimus Foundation (UBSOF), and others.
The initiative was a pioneering collaboration between leaders from across private and philanthropic sectors to scale up proven interventions to improve learning outcomes of students as well as address the critical gap in financing.
At $11 million, QEI DIB is the world’s largest DIB in education set up with three key objectives: (1) education—improve literacy and numeracy skills for 200,000 students by funding learning outcomes, (2) financial—show that outcomes-based financing delivers value for money and drives efficient spending, (3) systemic—demonstrate the benefits of outcomes-based financing to drive innovation in the global education sector and transform the traditional approach to grant-making and philanthropy.
At the end of four years, an independent evaluation showed that literacy and numeracy skills among QEI DIB students improved by 2.5 times in comparison to their peers, despite COVID-19 disruptions.
Airlink & USAID/BHA – Haiti Cholera Humanitarian Air Bridge Partnership – Haiti
Airlink and the United States Agency for International Development Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (USAID/BHA) established a humanitarian air bridge from the United States and Europe to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to address the significant logistics challenges related to delivering health and water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) supplies used in the treatment and prevention of cholera.
Through private sector donations from aviation and logistics companies and by leveraging economies of scale through charter flights, the air bridge program provided the aid community with fast, free transportation access.
The partnership ultimately reduced duplicative efforts in transportation and streamlined logistics services for responding agencies and saved the aid community more than $1M USD in transportation for the response.
Emprendimientos Productivos para la Paz (EMPROPAZ) – Colombia
Emprendimientos Productivos para la Paz (EMPROPAZ) is a partnership between Bancamía, a collective proposal of three non-profit organizations: the BBVA Microfinance Foundation, the Colombia World Women’s Corporation and the Medellín World Women’s Corporation and United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
Aligned since 2018, this partnership’s goal is to move the most vulnerable populations in Colombia away from poverty and provide them with opportunities to improve their quality of life through access to financial services and specialized business training which will promote the generation of legal income, the transformation of territories, and sustainable development.
Accelerated Learning Program – Ethiopia
Through this partnership, Luminos is supporting the government to strengthen the education system through curriculum and pedagogy design, teacher training, and monitoring and evaluation.
Having partnered since 2017, the Ministry of Education (MOE) of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia has adopted the Luminos model as the preferred solution to address the out-of-school challenge across Ethiopia, and build locally owned, culturally relevant, and highly sustainable catch-up education programs.
In response to a global learning crisis predating the COVID-19 pandemic, the Accelerated Learning Program (ALP) is a partnership between the Luminos Fund and Ethiopia’s Ministry of Education. Its mission is to deliver quality education to out-of-school children, enabling them to build foundational literacy and numeracy skills and reintegrate into government schools to continue their education.
The winner of the P3 Impact Award will be announced at the 2023 Concordia Annual Summit taking place the week of September 18, 2023. Stakeholders representing the finalists will showcase their partnership before judges and an in-person and digital audience.
Judges will evaluate each partnership based on the strength of cross-sector collaboration, measurable impact, economic and social-inclusion benefits, innovation, financial effectiveness, and scalability.
