Beyond Public-Private Partnerships: The Power of Social Enterprises

The world is falling behind on its development goals, putting the future of vulnerable populations at risk. While catching up is clearly a priority, solutions are less obvious, particularly at a time of funding fragility, high debt servicing costs and rising food and housing insecurity. It was against this backdrop that two University of Virginia Darden School of Business researchers, Vidya Mani and Maya Stephens, decided to explore a mechanism with a record of delivering social impact.

“Everyone agrees that we want a better world. It’s the implementation that’s missing,” says Mani, an associate professor.

With Stephens, a social scientist in the Office of Research Services, she has contributed a chapter to the book “Sustainable Business Practices and Social Entrepreneurship.” It examines cross-sector partnerships and how those that include social enterprises (mission-driven entities with revenue-positive models) can do more to address pressing social problems.

In efforts to meet the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), cross-sector partnerships are nothing new. Created to harness the strengths and resources of both public and private sectors, this model of impact has long been used to deliver public projects and services — such as roads, bridges and housing developments — more efficiently and effectively.

But while the model enables government and the private sector to share risks and rewards, and expands access to capital and new capabilities, it also presents challenges.

Given that the organizations involved are large, local community concerns can fall by the wayside. Without social buy-in, projects may be subject to pushback, activist campaigns or, at worst, violent protest.

This, says Mani, is where social enterprise fills a gap. “Social entrepreneurs are working on the ground implementing products or solutions,” she says. “By bringing them in you develop the project while keeping communities involved.”

Focused on local issues, social enterprises have insights that can inform the design of projects, whether they are applying ag-tech tools to soil health or using healthcare technologies to increase access to medical services. This helps secure local buy-in while their data-driven approaches are effective in tracking impact.

This is not to say it’s easy to bring social enterprises into public-private partnerships. For companies, finding organizations with the right capabilities and expertise can be tough. “Big corporations know what they’re good at, but they have to find a partner for an uncertain role,” says Mani. “It’s not like assessing a supplier.”

Moreover, governments know that to be sustainable for the long term, projects must generate revenue, operate at scale and become integrated into established systems. “You can’t set up a health clinic that has to close down when you leave,” says Mani.

Despite the challenges, the model is helping achieve diverse forms of social impact, as demonstrated by the winners of the P3 Impact Award. Established by the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Global Partnerships, Darden’s Institute for Business in Society and nonprofit Concordia, the award highlights leading practices and actionable insights of partnerships that improve the world.

“P3 Impact Award winners consistently demonstrate the value of structural resilience and shared responsibility among partners — elements critical for achieving short- and long-term impact,” says Hanne LeCount, executive director of Concordia.

In Ghana, for example, CocoaLink — a partnership between the US’s Hershey Company, the Ghana Cocoa Board and three social enterprises — uses mobile technology to give farmers in five cocoa-growing regions access to advice on yield improvement, child labor prevention and safe farming practices. Based on its success (including a 45% increase in yields and a 70% rise in income for participating farmers), in 2014, the Ghanaian government integrated CocoaLink into its national extension services.

Meanwhile, in Bangladesh, the Sanitation Marketing Systems (SanMarkS) initiative has strengthened demand for and supply of high-quality sanitation in rural areas. Partners have included Bangladesh’s Department of Public Health Engineering, the Swiss Development Cooperation and UNICEF while Rangpur Foundry manufactured and distributed affordable, high-quality latrine components. Social enterprise iDE provided training for last-mile entrepreneurs in marketing and production, while linking supply chain actors and advocating for targeted subsidies.

These and other P3 Impact Award Winners demonstrate the possibilities. “When social enterprises are included in public-private partnerships, they often contribute deep local knowledge, stronger community engagement and higher rates of adoption,” says LeCount. “And their revenue-generating models can help sustain and scale successful initiatives, extending impact well beyond the life of initial funding.”

The question is how to enable these kinds of collaborations to become the norm, replicating impact to accelerate progress on meeting the SDGs. LeCount argues that, among other things, investment is needed to establish clear performance metrics and create incentives for cross-sector collaboration. “Over time, these investments can help connect diverse sectors around market-based solutions to complex global challenges,” she says.

Mani is optimistic that, despite the hurdles, combining the policy tools of government, the operational capabilities of the private sector and the on-the-ground insights of social enterprise can deliver social impact at a global scale. “If we can get all three sectors to sit down together and use those bridges to meet development goals,” she says, “society as a whole will benefit.”

This article is based on the chapter “Policy and Ecosystem Support of Social Entrepreneurship – Use of Public-Private Partnerships (P3)" in “Sustainable Business Practices and Social Entrepreneurship” (2026).