The deadly trio of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria kills nearly six million people a year, most of them in poor countries. Fighting and preventing such diseases is difficult anywhere, but particularly in developing countries, which often lack the money, institutions, infrastructure, or even political stability needed to cope. Indeed, as the global health community has come to recognize that no single entity can contend with such maladies effectively, more than 70 health alliances have been formed in the past decade. These global partnerships link the efforts of the public, private, and nonprofit sectors to focus much-needed attention, expertise, and money on a given problem—say, malaria or poor nutrition.
Evidence suggests that such collaboration works.1 Partnerships not only allow donors and governments to undertake larger-scale (and higher-risk) activities than they could by themselves but also bring visibility to the problems and thereby attract more funding. Furthermore, partnerships can help countries coordinate efforts and avoid the duplication of investments and activities that often occurs when well-intentioned nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and other groups simultaneously address the same cause or tackle it in disparate ways.
However, the partnerships are far from perfect. As the development community knows, the introduction of a windfall of...