Evaluating Product Development Partnerships: Beyond Quantitative Metrics

Global Health Partnerships have been seen to epitomise new challenges in global health governance bringing together a wide range of actors (public, private, local, foreign) who coalesce around trans-national health issues. Many of these partnerships were listed in The Initiative on Public Private Partnerships for Health (IPPPH) database. The IPPPH worked from 2000 to 2004 to increase the effectiveness of public-private collaborations, particularly those involved in health product development. Part of its activities involved the creation of a database outlining the activities and structure of many of the international health public private partnerships (PPPs) from the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria to initiatives such as the African Programme for Onchocerciasis Control. One of the roles of the database was to provide a ‘one-stop-shop’ for information about the partnerships to increase their governance transparency and evaluation. This paper will discuss the opportunities and pitfalls offered by a database of this nature for evaluating these partnerships, placed within a wider discussion regarding the focus evaluation activities should take. This discussion forces us to ask alternative evaluative questions. Such questions include what it means to be a ‘partner’ and whether the partnerships create useful long term consequences such as capacity building particularly when working in developing countries. In particular the paper discusses the need to think ‘out of the box’ towards evaluating the institutional and organisational meso level mechanisms or ‘social technologies’ that provide an alternative equity perspective to measuring PPPs for product development success