#FOCUSED ON HEALTH DRIVERS#
#FOCUSED ON HEALTH SERIES#

Health has been recognized as crucial for sustainable human development and an essential contributor to economic growth.

The goals apply to countries across all levels of income and current development status. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) consist of 17 specific goals and 169 associated targets that establish quantitative objectives across the social, economic, and environmental dimensions of sustainable development, all to be achieved by 2030. Recognizing the potential opportunities for positive health effects across the development agenda, relevant stakeholders for this framework are wide-ranging and inclusive of nontraditional health actors in both the public and private sectors. Companies include national and multinational businesses that are engaging in partnerships at a national level. The central stakeholders in these partnerships are government and private-sector companies. This framework is intended as both a call to action and a tool for developing health-focused public-private partnerships at the national level that are inclusive of business.

An enabling environment is needed to encourage and monitor partnerships as well as to provide a platform for initiating and sustaining cross-sectoral discussion to advance the health agenda.

All partners and stakeholders should have a shared understanding of the health and development priorities of the government, the health status of the partnership’s target population, and the shared goals to advance community-identified priorities.

Greater impact is possible when business engages in development through broad-based partnerships and coordination with government along with the development community, academia, foundations, and civil society, among other entities.

Sustainable and scalable solutions to health and development challenges are possible when companies use their core competencies and align their business interests with public-sector priorities.

Addressing health and its determinants is central to advancing the human development agenda.

Health outcomes are the product of multiple health determinants, inclusive of health care as well as social, behavioral, environmental, and economic factors.

The framework is based on several key assumptions: To advance the dialogue from the workshop series, we propose here a framework for developing health-focused public-private partnerships based on priorities countries are defining through their national plans for sustainable development.

#FOCUSED ON HEALTH SERIES#

In 2016 the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened a workshop series on engaging business and developing partnerships to advance health and the SDGs with the objectives of better understanding the perspectives of critical stakeholders and facilitating discussion on challenges and opportunities to make progress. Given the centrality of health to development and the SDGs agenda, it is critical that progress be made to more effectively align business and public interests in support of health-focused initiatives to advance the SDGs. Within the health sector specifically, there has been much progress in public-private collaboration, but historic examples of misalignment between business motivations and public interests have created a lingering wariness among some stakeholders about business engagement in global health. However, tensions still exist around the role of private companies in development despite this call for engagement in the SDGs and the related case for business. The case has also been made that investing in the goals can protect and grow business as well as foster economic growth. The goals themselves, through Goal 17, explicitly invite business to be a partner in their implementation. Private-sector innovation, expertise, and financing are needed to meet the demands of the SDGs.

#FOCUSED ON HEALTH DRIVERS#

Although governments are the primary drivers for implementation of the agenda, it has been widely acknowledged that public-sector resources often fall far short of what is needed to achieve the goals. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) constitute a broad and ambitious agenda for the world to achieve by 2030.

Focused on health