Secretary Clinton Announces Up to $86.5 Million in New Public-Private Partnerships

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton today launched up to $86.5 million in new public-private partnership commitments to support a range of activities including women’s clean energy entrepreneurship, clean cookstove investments, support for programs that advance the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender persons, and access to affordable internet in low-income communities. These announcements were made at an event celebrating the public-private partnerships launched during Secretary’s tenure, and recognizing their success in promoting sustainable solutions to key global challenges.

“..Partnerships have been a hallmark of what we’ve done in the last four years here at the State Department, because many of the challenges that we face extend beyond traditional, political, and even geographic divisions,” said Secretary Clinton. “And I’m confident that the United States, under our next Secretary and in the Obama Administration and, I hope, for years to come, will continue building this capacity for creating and nurturing and growing partnerships that produce results around the world.”

The new partnerships commitments include:

wPower. With an amount that is anticipated to grow to more than $10 million subject to Congressional appropriations, wPower is designed to advance women’s clean energy entrepreneurship around the world. It is supported by the State Department, USAID, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. This innovative new partnership will unlock women’s capacity to increase energy access across India, East Africa, and Nigeria by empowering more than 7,000 women to launch small businesses around small-scale energy technologies including solar lanterns and clean cookstoves. The partnership will provide training and business assistance and scale efforts to build women’s distribution networks.

Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. The Alliance, launched by Secretary Clinton in 2010 to address the 4 million premature deaths that occur each year due to exposure to toxic cookstove smoke, announced four new commitments today to clean cookstove technologies from leading firms. These include:

• Up to $70 million investment in promoting clean cookstoves in East Africa. The Paradigm Project – a Colorado-based cookstove business – and Bunge – a global agribusiness and food company – are collaborating with the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves to expand Paradigm’s clean cookstove program in the region and will aim to bring 4 to 5 million clean stoves and thousands of new jobs to the market by 2020.
• A $4 million commitment between the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation and General Electric under the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves to finance a cookstove manufacturing project in East Africa in coordination with Burn Manufacturing Company. The partnership will establish a clean cookstove manufacturing facility in Kenya and satellite assembly plants in Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda, which are expected to manufacture and sell 3.6 million clean cookstoves in the region by 2020.
• A partnership between Philips and the Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa (IDC) to fund the development of a new company, African Clean Energy, to manufacture the cleanest solid biomass cookstoves made in Africa that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has tested. The pilot manufacturing of 5,000 stoves has been a success. Both Philips and the IDC are now working with channel partners and through direct consumer sales, to make the Philips clean woodstove available across the African market so that cleaner air and reduced fuel usage may benefit many, particularly the poor.
• Mongolia and France officially joined the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves as partners.

Other partnership commitments include:

• Pledge of support to the Global Equality Fund. The Arcus Foundation has made a $1 million commitment to match corporate contributions to the Department of State’s Global Equality Fund, which seeks to protect and advance the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities worldwide. In addition, the M·A·C AIDS Fund, the philanthropic arm of M·A·C Cosmetics, committed resources to the Fund. Like-minded partner governments, including Norway, the Netherlands and France - also plan to contribute as well. The Department hopes other institutions will follow the important examples these institutions have set.
• Announced the Alliance for Affordable Internet. The Alliance will promote affordable access to the Internet and reduce the gender gap associated with connectivity in low-income communities by working with governments and regulators and private sector partners. The Alliance is supported by the State Department, Omidyar Network, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.K. Department for International Development, Google, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, Yahoo and several civil society organizations and the World Wide Web Foundation.
• U.S. –ASEAN Prize for Women in Science. The Department of State and Underwriters Laboratories will recognize the accomplishments and contributions of women scientists in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) region through the newly established U.S.-ASEAN Prize for Women in Science. The competition will raise the profile of women scientists and seek to enhance and sustain science and technology cooperation in the ASEAN region.
• Partners for a New Beginning. The partnership is releasing its 2013 Status Report highlighting the collective work of the global initiative over the past two years. In that time, PNB and its local chapters have launched, expanded, or pledged support for more than 180 new projects that promote entrepreneurship, expand access to capital, and enhance educational opportunities in the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia.
• Benjamin Kane Gupta Fellowship. The Fellowship will enable youth and others interested in public service to spend a year working in the Global Partnership Initiative learning about partnership building. The Fellowship will be funded by the Gupta family and administered by the George Washington University in honor of Ben Gupta, a former colleague in the office of the Global Partnership Initiative. The first Gupta Fellows will start at the Department in the fall of 2013.

Since 2009, the Secretary has worked to strengthen and deepen U.S. diplomacy and development around the world through partnerships that leverage the creativity, innovation, and core business resources of private sector partners for greater impact. To date, the Department has worked with over 1,100 partners and leveraged more than $650 million in public and private resources to support key foreign policy objectives including climate change mitigation, women’s empowerment, economic growth, and human rights.

Learn more about key public-private partnership achievements:

http://www.state.gov/s/partnerships/achievements/index.htm