Capacity building for Tanzanian publicprivate partnerships (PPPS) projects: Challenges and advocated solutions

Despite the popularity of public-private partnerships (PPPs) as a means of alleviating social housing and infrastructural needs and improving service delivery in both developing and developed economies, the lack of capacity remains one of the major problems in implementing PPPs particularly in developing economies. Empirical studies around capacity building for PPPs are also limited. To address the identified knowledge gaps, this study seeks to examine the challenges impacting the capacity building for the Tanzanian PPP projects, as well as explore the strength of interactions between challenges. Questionnaire survey approach was used to collect data from 81 PPP Tanzanian practitioners who were purposely targeted. Response data was subjected to descriptive statistics, parametric and non-parametric tests to examine the differences in the perception of the identified capacity building challenges, and inherent relationships amongst them. Ensuing descriptive and empirical analysis demonstrated a disparity in the ranking of the 8 challenges among those with and without PPP experience, with 4 having statistically significant differences. Based on the overall sample, the highly ranked seven challenges (mean score > 3.50) in ascending order were: 1) limited local people with experience; 2) lack of resources; 3) lack of successful PPP projects; 4) lack of permanent PPP trainers; 5) higher costs in conducting PPP training, 6) lack of hands-on training; and 7) inadequate qualifications. The least ranked was lack of political will for promoting PPPs. The major finding from the correlation analysis was the existence of the strong and positive correlation between 'inadequate qualifications' and 'lack of hands-on training'. Suggested solutions were nested within the training and education, lessons learnt through PPP project exemplars, benchmarking of PPP projects through local and foreign visit categories. The results of this study foster a better understanding of the different mechanisms for overcoming the capacity building challenges.