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Education is a key building block to boosting economic growth, establishing a healthy, stable, and productive society, and unlocking the dreams and imaginations of young people. Yet with 100 million school-aged children not attending primary school, according to UNESCO, the global community faces a serious challenge.

Ensuring that children everywhere, girls and boys, will complete their primary schooling by 2015, is a key Millennium Development Goal (see “Education for All: A Report Card”). Yet, according to the UN Millennium Project, meeting that minimum standard globally is estimated to cost between $7 billion and $17 billion per year—far beyond the reach of most governments. As the divide between scarce resources and staggering needs continues to widen, there is growing evidence that partnerships involving different stakeholders have a role to play in addressing the world’s persistent social and economic challenges.

Over the past few years, a commitment to building alliances between governments and the private sector has been embraced by international donors, the United Nations, and the World Economic Forum, as well as by a growing number of private companies. Many of these alliances are helping to reach Millennium Development Goals by combining business competencies with local knowledge, and by mobilizing greater resources. Ongoing local contributions by companies working in niche areas—of personnel, expertise, or equipment—are changing the way that development is done, and can lead to greater innovation.

The Business Trust of South Africa, for example, currently works with 145 companies and expects to raise $85 million over the next five years to better align that country’s education targets with employment opportunities for young students. In another example, the GE Foundation, the International Youth Foundation, and local non-governmental organizations have collaborated to design and implement a life skills and employability training curriculum for young people in Mexico, India, Poland, and Hungary in order to keep them in school and increase their chances of employability. At one school in Mexico, the number of students dropping out of school was reduced by 50 percent.

Planning and designing strategies together is another advantage that public-private partnerships offer. When the private sector is engaged in the conversation about how to improve conditions and opportunities for today’s youth, new opportunities surface. In a small project in Morocco funded jointly by USAID and Microsoft, for example, a partnership between the Al Jisr Foundation, Microsoft, and the International Youth Foundation trains young people to refurbish computers, maintain them, and provide technical support. Newly refurbished computers are then sold to schools at rock bottom prices. In this project, everyone wins: the schools, the young people who gain sought-after skills, and the computer industry in Morocco, which sorely needs computer technicians. While the project is small, it fills an expressed need in a sustainable manner.

While there are clear benefits to mobilizing resources and expertise through alliances, there can also be challenges. Public and private sector stakeholders may have different approaches to the bottom line, different agendas, or may be operating on different time tables. They may have suspicions or doubts about the value and motives of working with each other, and hold varying visions of success. Thus, it takes careful planning and added transparency to clarify the roles and objectives of all partners, and to come up with ways that organizations with different assets can build something of value together.

Despite these challenges and potential pitfalls, the demand and desire to create partnerships between companies, governments, international organizations, and local citizens groups represents a critical strategy in today’s globalized world. As all of us continue to develop new ways to build effective alliances, we do so in the hope that together, we can make a greater difference than we ever would on our own.