Within the international development community, there is a growing consensus among actors from different sectors that societal challenges in developing contexts cannot be solved unilaterally and need to be tackled with others. The potential of so-called cross-sector partnerships receives particular attention in the context of complex development settings, like countries affected by conflict and fragility. Interest in cross-sector partnerships is based on the belief that structural collaboration between actors from the public sector, the private sector, and civil society is at the heart of integrated efforts to address the multidimensional challenges these societies are faced with. The particular significance of this topic for these types of countries was confirmed during a workshop on cross-sector partnerships organized at the most recent edition of the Africa Works! Conference. 

A direct output of the workshop is a research note by Paul Lange (Clingendael) with the aim to contribute to the topic of cross-sector partnerships in fragile settings. In addition, the research note draws on the example of a partnership in Burundi that was also presented during the workshop. It involves a multinational company, a donor government and international and national NGOs that together work on the “White Sorghum value chain development” a project on youth employment in rural areas in Burundi (‘Burundi partnership’). This case study is available here.