Sparking conversations with the private sector to catalyze health system change

AMP Health brought together ministry of health teams from Ghana, Malawi, Sierra Leone and Zambia for a three-day online learning programme under the theme Leading Change. We wanted to challenge teams to think differently about their work and to reimagine what is possible.

To bring in a different set of perspectives, and to encourage ministry teams to take new approaches, we invited leaders from the private sector and paired each of them up with a different ministry team.

When bringing the private and public sector together, the biggest challenge is often establishing trust. Those who work in the public sector may be suspicious that the private sector is motivated only by profit or does not understand the complexity of getting things done while managing political processes. Meanwhile, people in the private sector often see their public sector counterparts as overly bureaucratic and inefficient.

In solving for this trust deficit, we saw an opportunity to design an interactive learning session that would benefit both our partner ministry of health teams and our invited private sector guests. We decided to design these sessions not as talks by experts from the private sector, but instead as joint brainstorming sessions to assist ministry teams in thinking through some of the problems that they were trying to solve, and in seizing potentially unrecognised opportunities.

We deliberately invited private sector people who had nothing to do with health care systems, for example the founder of a teachers college; a telecom executive; the director of a design and marketing firm; and a senior partner in a law firm. Our brief to them was to act as “Sparks”: to stay curious, ask good questions and to spark conversations. In turn, the ministry of health teams had the chance to educate our private sector guests, allowing them to demonstrate their expertise and drive to set ambitious public health visions.

By showing genuine curiosity and actively listening, the Sparks showed they wanted to truly understand the other side, and this was then reciprocated – the ministry of health teams got genuinely curious about what the private sector thought and the ideas they suggested.  With no connection to the health sector, the Sparks were also seen as coming to the conversation without an agenda or ulterior motive. This helped the ministry of health teams to feel that whatever the Sparks said was in the spirit of being helpful, and therefore to open up about their challenges.

Coming out of the workshop, the ministry of health teams all said that the brainstorming session with the Sparks was a highlight, and that they had not realized that they could get such value from a conversation with someone who knew nothing about health systems.  They all said they wanted to have more of these kinds of conversations, and wanted to both engage with and learn from the private sector. At least one of our teams has kept in contact with their Spark and, of their own accord, set up time to keep the conversation going.

Klara Michal is Chief Learning Officer at AMP Health