Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs): Why, What, and How for Sustainable Immunization Financing

Immunization programs worldwide face challenges related to increasing immunization budgets and improving program performance, that can potentially be addressed through public-private partnerships (PPPs). Immunization programs face a myriad of challenges, ranging from limited or inflexible budgets to program performance issues of access and coverage. These challenges are commonly seen across different countries, and adversely impact the public sector’s ability to add new vaccines to the schedule or to expand schedules to broader target cohorts. Many of these systems and program challenges, while large, can potentially be addressed through strategic partnerships with the private sector to leverage its resources, expertise and capabilities. By engaging in PPPs both governments and private companies can benefit from each partners’ unique strengths to mutually and sustainably address challenges that otherwise prevent governments from achieving sustained and growing immunization programs.

Common understanding and a clear typology of PPPs are needed to ensure partnerships result in increased shared value. The term PPP has been used for decades to describe projects across numerous sectors, including energy, agriculture, transportation and health. Despite the term’s widespread use, there is neither a universally accepted definition of a PPP, nor a definitive system of classification for different types of PPPs. There is need to better understand the challenges that PPPs tend to address, reasons why public and private sector partners are motivated to enter into a collaborative arrangement, and different models of PPPs that link the challenges to motivations for shared value across partners. Towards that end, this resource guide is designed to enhance the understanding of PPPs and how they may be used to address challenges commonly found in immunization financing. This guide focuses on ensuring a common language and shared understanding of PPP typology, supported with examples of models across health and non-health sectors that have addressed financing and systems performance issues. The objective of this guide is to provide guidance on how define, select, and design PPPs for increased shared value across public and private sector partners.

PPPs represent a new way for private stakeholders to engage with governments to address immunization financing challenges. Stakeholders outside of governments are often uniquely positioned to leverage their expertise and capabilities in a PPP to support national immunization programs in ensuring increased national budgets and strong systems to absorb those budgets efficiently for sustaining and growing immunization programs. This guide will apply commonly seen challenges facing immunization financing to the PPP typology developed in order to demonstrate how public or private actors can begin to design PPPs to improve sustainable immunization financing. The objective of this work is to share a clear, methodological way of defining and classifying PPPs and process for selecting and adapting appropriate models.