Deepening the relationship: a stage-by-stage guide to strengthening partnerships between donors and implementers in MSD programmes

Donors and implementers both want to procure MSD programmes with a high chance of achieving significant results. However, they operate under different incentives: donors need accountability and value-for-money, while implementers need flexibility and the space to focus on learning.

When it comes to procuring an MSD programme, decision makers face a challenge in evaluating different organisations’ competence to deliver this complex task. The two most common proxies are implementers’ projections for the scale of impact they will achieve and their history of previous MSD experience. Both are problematic.

This document provides guidance to help donors and implementers reconcile the legitimate needs of administrative bureaucracy with the complexities of market system facilitation.

It focuses guidance on the procurement process, which is broken down into four stages: 

1. preparation and scoping
2. tendering/bidding
3. evaluation
4. inception & implementation

About the MSD Procurement Series

This paper is the second in a series of four. It is a collaborative product of a group of accomplished MSD practitioners and donors who worked together voluntarily in knowledge clinics over four months in early 2020 to synthesise their accumulated knowledge and experience of procurement arrangements for programmes that use the MSD approach. 
Watch the BEAM webinar - How to do MSD procurement: practical insights from donors and implementers - where clinic participants discussed their findings.
 

Links to the other papers are below.