At my organization, we obsess over how to leverage and expand our impact by joining forces with others, improving collaborations and building stronger partnerships. We deeply believe we will never accomplish alone as much as we can with others. We use the term "radical" to encourage our team to always push a collaboration further, even when it is harder than moving alone. Through radical collaboration, we can accept the risks that come with interdependence on other entities with different agendas, while also recognizing that diverse resources lead to innovation.

Throughout my nonprofit's 20 years of existence, we have embedded two areas of collaboration in our DNA: our partnerships with governments and with the private sector. We have written extensively about how we see governments as the ultimate stewards of scale to achieve our mission to transform healthcare delivery for the most underreached. What sometimes gets lost is how the private sector acts as a contributor and driver of change in government systems. It's vital that both the private and public sectors recognize these dynamics and build mutual, high-impact collaborations, leveraging the strengths of both sectors.

For us, private sector engagement has never been focused just on corporate social responsibility. As nonprofit leaders, I believe our engagements should focus on market-driven demand-supply matching, where both the government and the private partner have strategic business reasons to engage. We've found that you can make the most impact acting as the matchmaker at both the strategic and operational levels.

Over time, we have defined our own playbook for building scalable collaborations between the government and the private sector to drive improved healthcare delivery. Although our lessons come from working in sub-Saharan Africa, they are relevant for any organization that wants to leverage the private sector as part of their strategy.

Read the full article about radical collaboration by Emily Bancroft at Forbes.