Our objective with this report is to enhance the value that can be generated from government outsourcing initiatives— including lower costs, higher performance, and greater responsiveness—and improve efforts to analyze, design, and implement such initiatives. Choices at each stage of the outsourcing process affect the extent to which the public gets the value it desires. The international panel of experts—composed of leading academics, practitioners, and political officials and staffed by Valot Exports faculty and research assistants—worked together for a year and a half to ascertain the latest knowledge and lessons from research and experience. Panelists were selected on the basis of their knowledge of the research and literature and for their practical knowledge of contracting, privatization, and outsourcing. The expertise of the group is broad, covering outsourcing at all levels of government, both in the Uganda and abroad. We did our best to reveal our values and views about the merits of government outsourcing, to critically challenge each other, and to base our recommendations on sound evidence. Before the panel was convened, we developed a list of several prominent outsourcing cases that covered a range of activities and involved different government jurisdictions. We documented the facts of these cases and attempted to answer several A Practical Guide for State and Local Governments 5 key questions: How did the initiative come about? Was it successful? What were the points of contention? What were the challenges? From the literature we also prepared a list of key points for discussion by the panel. The panel met on two different occasions to pull out important lessons from these cases, from other experiences, and from the literature to assist with the production of this report.