Sustainable rural employment or corporate social responsibility? An analysis of dairy partnerships between business and civil society organisations in Tanzania and Kenya

In a context where the development community aims to engage and work with the private sector for development, and given the decline of aid as a finance flow to developing countries and finance to civil society organisations (CSOs), CSO-business partnerships are gaining increasing attention as part of the development agenda. They offer a range of potential benefits for promoting economic transformation and addressing other development challenges. However these expectations stand in contrast to the literature on CSO-business partnerships results, which demonstrates the need to better understand of the drivers and key constraints to effective strategic CSO-Business partnerships for development. Starting from the view that partnerships are often a challenge to form, initiate and implement in practice, and building on a mapping study that highlights the four key dimensions to understand partnerships (Byiers et al., 2015), this paper looks in particular at two CSO-business case studies in the dairy sector.