Policy innovation is needed to foster economic prosperity in Africa | Africa at LSE

For context, given Africa’s inability to harness the benefits of both the agricultural and industrial revolutions – as envisaged for a long time in contemporary development thinking – the rise of the digital knowledge economy is generating a lot of hope for the socio-economic transformation of the continent, albeit with cautious optimism. This has implications for the innovation discourse, particularly in the context of public-private policy partnerships.

Society wants the supply of public services like healthcare, education, security, and infrastructure to be flexible, innovative, and efficient. However, the barriers created by bureaucracies often stifle innovation. Harnessing the policy-market nexus to increase aggregate welfare depends, to a large extent, not only on how business-government relations are designed and managed but also on the specific dimensions of such relationships.

To address disturbing patterns of poverty, conflicts, and income inequality, policy innovations and reforms across Africa’s political economy institutions are key. This is because most public policy challenges are complex and non-linear in nature.

Africa’s public policy architecture must devise sustainable solutions to the continent’s myriad of challenges. Achieving this objective will, among other things, involve paying attention to the various stages of political decision-making. In the context of John Kingdon’s Multiple Streams Framework, this will include modern applications of policy approaches and devices across systems and processes in the policy cycle.

No doubt, policy entrepreneurship – through robust public-private policy partnerships – remains vital in advancing this agenda. While research abounds on the role of policy change in the socio-economic development of the continent, the role of policy innovation through public-private policy partnerships is grossly under-explored.

It is important to clarify that while public-private partnerships (PPPs) have traditionally been leveraged to address challenges in physical and digital infrastructure, their application to core public policy problems is somewhat limited. However, the notion of public-private policy partnerships advanced here is different from conventional PPP analysis. Rather, the focus is on the involvement of private actors in traditional public sector operations in specific policy domains.