DFID assumes the leadership of PPP advocacy

Chapter 4 examines efforts by bilateral donors to drive the global PPP agenda beginning in the early 2000s. As the World Bank continued to promote PPPs, while taking a slower and more deliberative approach to the understanding of these mechanisms, bilateral donors like the U.K.’s Department for International Development (DFID) grew impatient to make progress with private investment in the poorest countries. With a robust development budget and a remarkably strong faith in the power of private sector-led development-driven at least partly by what seemed like the successes of the U.K.’s popular domestic PPP program-DFID helped convince other donors to support a growing portfolio of PPP facilities and programs. Some of these were advisory facilities like multi-donor trust funds financed by donors but managed by the World Bank, like the Public-Private Infrastructure Advisory Facility (PPIAF) and the Global Partnership on Output-based Aid (GPOBA). DFID’s efforts also produced the first generation of what later would be called PPP “project preparation facilities” (PPFs). Independent evaluations found that DFID-supported programs lacked clear performance monitoring and evaluation requirements, and emphasized persuasion and advocacy over evaluation and analysis. These became widespread, enduring characteristics of donor-funded PPFs.