By Imaduddin Ahmed and Shilesh Muralidhara

The East African | January 11, 2014

Partnerships can be wonderful. They can also be disastrous. So, too, is this the case with partnerships entered into by governments and businesses for the delivery of public goods, which can either lose countries millions of dollars per project or initiate virtuous economic growth cycles.

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are mechanisms in which governments transfer upfront costs and risks for infrastructure projects meeting public needs to private sector developers.

Power plants, water treatment facilities, roads, stadia, airports, hospitals — all of these can be given birth under PPPs, where the private sector constructs and potentially transfers the assets to the state. (Privatisation involves the opposite flow of assets – from government to the private sector – and yet many government officials and business people will confuse PPPs for privatisation.) By allowing the government or public to repay the private developer by matching payments against use of the resulting infrastructure asset, PPPs overcome the initial barrier to investment – lack of sufficient capital to cover high upfront costs of construction. In this way, PPPs both release government funds for additional projects and create infrastructure where none would have otherwise existed. Where the infrastructure adds more to the productivity of an economy than its cost, this arrangement spurs economic growth.

Consider three sizeable PPP energy deals that Rwanda’s state utility has signed in the past year. Private developers will inject more than $300 million of capital to construct and operate plants that will more than double the country’s electricity supply while reducing the utility’s average cost of generating energy. In return, the utility will be obliged to purchase a minimum quantity of the lower-cost energy. The result: The state utility may be able to offer end-users lower tariffs, therefore, allowing industries to expand their operations and employ more workers, and the Treasury will be able to reallocate subsidies to other areas of the economy that are in need of support.

Poorly conceived, poorly negotiated or poorly managed, however, and PPPs may end up costing more than they are worth — or end up in dissatisfied customers or suppliers.

Governments’ desire for private capital can make them lose focus on the end-benefit of a project to its citizens. An obvious and well documented example of this recently happened in the UK.

Faced with a cost of refurbishing two hospitals for £30 million in the city of Coventry, the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) elected to outsource the cost to the private sector.

To make the project attractive to business, the NHS had a private developer demolish the hospitals and replace them with a hospital with fewer beds and fewer services. After overruns, the final bill for the project, which opened in 2006, came to £410 million.

The NHS’s annual payments to the private developer now exceed the initial total estimated cost of the refurbishment. To keep up with these payments, the hospital has been forced to make redundancies, charge patients for drop-offs and levy exorbitant parking fees. It’s safe to assume that the patients are not happy.