Here's a few facts:
After Bill Clinton's presidency, he determined to use his name and his popularity to do good in the world. What started out as a modest undertaking in Little Rock twenty years ago, has grown to become one of the largest NGO's in the world, rivaling the Ford Foundation and the Gates foundation.
Like those organizations, the Clinton Foundation is set up as an endowment. It will be around long after the Clinton's are gone.
NO ONE in the Clinton family is on the paid staff, or draws a salary from the foundation.
The Clinton Foundation has no financial connection to the Senatorial or Presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton.
Despite reports in the conservative media, upwards of 80+% of the money donated to the Foundation goes into programs.
The following list is just a portion of the programs of the Foundation:
When the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) was founded in 2002, only 200,000 people were receiving treatment for HIV/AIDS in low and middle income countries, with medicines that cost over $10,000 per person per year. Drug pricing agreements have saved the developing world more than $1 billion. Working with the governments of developing countries and the pharmaceutical industry, Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) has helped dramatically lower the cost of lifesaving medicines and diagnostics for HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis. Globally, CHAI negotiates price reductions for drugs and diagnostics, customize products for resource-limited settings, and work to broaden the supply base and increase the quality of these treatments.
Providing a reliable buyer to 100,000 local farmers. Locally operated agribusinesses create jobs and help farmers build sustainable livelihoods. These businesses are reliable, long-term buyers for local produce and offer farmers a buffer against the price fluctuations that are endemic to the market. The Clinton Hunter Development Initiative (CHDI) and Rwandan co-investors established Mount Meru Soyco Limited, a large soy processing business that will produce cooking oil. Soyco will supply the Rwandan market, create jobs, and expand export opportunities. The company is contracting with an estimated 100,000 local farmers to grow soybeans.
Building on Clinton Hunter Development Initiative’s longstanding work with Rwandan coffee farmers, in 2009 CHDI and the Rwanda Coffee board initiated Rwandan Farmers Coffee Company (RFCC). RFCC will add value to Rwanda’s premium coffee while creating jobs and securing better returns to farmers. RFCC is building a coffee roasting and packaging facility in Kigali that will have the capacity to process 3,000 tons of coffee every year, improving incomes for 50,000 local coffee farmers, and employing 40 staff at the factory.
Most low-income countries have national immunization programs that routinely vaccinate 70 to 90 percent of their infants. The eight vaccines included in most programs, together, usually cost less than $20 per infant. However, the inclusion of the newly developed rotavirus and pneumococcal vaccines could nearly double this cost. The Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) is partnering with the governments of Kenya, Ethiopia, and Malawi to support the national rollout of the new pneumococcal and rotavirus vaccines and to capture lessons that will help other countries successfully introduce these vaccines. When pneumococcal and rotavirus vaccine programs reach national scale in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Malawi, nearly 50,000 child deaths will be prevented each year.
Diarrhea is responsible for more than 700,000 deaths among children each year. Zinc and Oral Rehydration Salts (ORS) – a highly effective treatment that can cost less than US 50 cents per child – can prevent over 90 percent of these diarrhea-related deaths, yet less than 1 percent of children who are in need of treatment are receiving it. The root cause of this issue is that providers and consumers are often unaware that zinc and ORS is the recommended treatment, which creates a lack of demand. Due to this, suppliers have limited incentive to invest in distribution and promotion of these products. To overcome this, CHAI is working in India, Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda to scale up the usage of these products by building demand, and increasing availability in both public and private facilities.
President Clinton and Chelsea Clinton convert dirty water to clean, safe drinking water through Procter&Gamble's CGI commitment. Through a CGI commitment, Procter&Gamble and World Vision are teaming up to save one life every hour by 2020 by providing developing communities with water purification packets.
More than 28,000 farmers in Malawi have increased their incomes five times over. The Anchor Farm Project is a CDI-operated commercial farm that partners with thousands of neighboring smallholder farmers, providing them with access to quality inputs for maize and soy production as well as training and market access. Farmers in the project have access to improved soy seed and to training in advanced agronomic techniques, and they have direct access to a domestic bulk buyer of their soy. In 2012, CDI scaled up the project to five farms, providing resources to more than 28,000 smallholder farmers. CDI is also working with banks in Malawi to provide smallholder farmers with loans to finance their input purchases and banking accounts to help them save money after the sale of their crops.
Tree farming projects in Kenya help to make forest conservation and restoration profitable for local communities. The Clinton Climate Initiative (CCI) is currently working on 10 sustainable forest management projects encompassing 644,000 hectares of land that will benefit more than 353,000 people.
CCI's SLEEK program will give farmers access to a wealth of climate, soil and crop data through SMS and simple tablet applications. This will provide farmers with up to date information, helping them make better decisions about which crops to plant and when.
Women entrepreneurs in the Chakipi Acceso network are expected to at least double their current incomes. Chakipi Acceso is a last-mile distribution enterprise that equips women in Apurimac, Peru with sales skills training and consigned products such as packaged foods, personal care items, pharmaceuticals, solar lamps, and clean cookstoves. The Chakipi entrepreneurs then sell these products to others within their communities providing essential, life-changing goods that are otherwise hard or impossible to access.
Though effective malaria treatments exist, they are often unaffordable or unavailable. Less than 15 percent of children with fever, for example, are treated with effective artemisinin-based combination treatment (ACT). CHAI supports eight countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia in accessing a factory-gate subsidy on high quality ACTs. CHAI has negotiated price reductions of up to 80 percent for ACTs available through the private sector. As of May 2011, over 150 million doses of subsidized drugs have been ordered under CHAI-negotiated prices in both the public and private sectors. CHAI is also helping Swaziland advance towards becoming the first country in mainland sub-Saharan Africa to eliminate malaria — a goal many experts thought impossible.
There is a shortage of quality labor to meet the growing demands of many industries within developing countries. The Acceso Centro de Formación para el Trabajo (Acceso Training Center Enterprise) was created to support a range of employability programs, including hospitality, aimed at improving the livelihoods for thousands of disadvantaged youth in Cartagena, Colombia.
In collaboration with the Government of Haiti, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the U.S. State Department, the Clinton Foundation assisted with the development of the Caracol Industrial Park, which could ultimately create up 60,000 jobs and help to decentralize the Haitian economy. Today, the Korean apparel manufacturer Sae-A is the anchor tenant and will create 20,000 jobs alone.
Launched in June 2011, in an initial group of four Latin American cities – Bogota, Curitiba, Rio de Janeiro, and Sao Paulo – this innovative program seeks to reduce the carbon footprint of public transportation in Latin America and develop a market for fuel efficient, low-carbon buses in the region. Ultimately, the program aims to catalyze the deployment of up to 9,000 buses across Latin American cities over the next five years, with steady-state reduction of annual CO2 emissions by 475,000 tons.
Haiti was once responsible for half the world's coffee production. The Clinton Foundation is working to grow Haiti's coffee sector by bringing Haitian coffee to new markets and has facilitated new purchase agreements between Haitian coffee companies, cooperatives and international buyers. In 2012, the Foundation began work on the Haiti Coffee Academy with international coffee company La Colombe Torrefaction. With support from the Leslois Shaw Foundation, the Haiti Coffee Academy will be a model coffee farm and training center which will serve rural coffee growing communities with the objective of improving crop yields, the quality of coffee grown, and access to markets and investments.