Powered by Women’s Enterprise, Solar Sister, with the Green Belt Movement, African Wildlife Foundation, USAID, ExxonMobil, and the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, committed to expanding its network of Solar Sister Entrepreneurs by recruiting, training, and supporting an additional 3,000 female energy entrepreneurs in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda to become participants in a sustainable, market-based clean energy distribution network. In addition to improving their own economic status, these energy entrepreneurs will bring the benefits of solar lighting, mobile phone charging, and clean cookstove technologies to underserved and hard-to-reach rural communities.
The Hult International Business School’s Hult Prize committed to help launch a new wave of student social entrepreneurs. Through the continuation of its established global competition, Hult will bring together more than 1,000 college and university students in five-person teams to compete to spend the summer at the Hult Accelerator – a world-class center for innovation in Boston – and secure US $1 million in seed funding to start their businesses. The best six teams will be selected to work at the Accelerator and will pitch their idea at CGI’s Annual meeting in 2013, where President Clinton, along with CGI Meeting attendees, will select and award the winning team with the US $1 million prize.
By working with partners, CHAI is implementing the Rapidly Expanding Access to Care for HIV (REACH) Program, which will simultaneously save lives and strengthen health service delivery by expanding HIV-related services in 17 hospitals across Papua and West Papua. The program will also establish 120 satellite health centers, bringing health care to poor and remote communities, which will eventually be sustained through government health systems.
Additionally, CHAI and its partners have planned to scale up an integrated service approach to health services for tuberculosis, HIV treatment, and prevention of HIV transmission between mothers and their child. Over the next four years, CHAI, in partnership with the government of Indonesia, is working to test approximately 640,800 people for HIV, and provide nearly 20,160 people with antiretroviral treatment. The project is anticipated to reach more than 80 percent of people in need of testing and treatment.
The Niger Delta region of Nigeria is rich in oil but poor in infrastructure due to its history of strife. Before CHAI set out to make HIV/AIDS care accessible in the region, only a handful of hospitals were providing HIV services to the tens of thousands requiring it. With funding from the National Dutch Postcode Lottery, CHAI has been working to increase access to HIV/AIDS services for children through early infant diagnosis (EID) programs which could potentially avert up to 50 percent of deaths. CHAI’s work has resulted in a 350 percent increase in pediatric testing and an 80 percent return of patients who were previously not returning for treatment.
The earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2010 left hundreds of thousands of people dead, injured, or displaced and much of the country’s infrastructure in ruins. Yet already signs of Haiti’s resilience and promising future have returned. Through CGI, NRG Energy and the Solar Electric Light Fund have committed to expand clean, renewable solar energy to the Boucan Carré region, a mountainous area in central Haiti with limited infrastructure development. NRG and SELF will use a solar farm model to power medical clinics, schools, farms, water pumps, and street lights — demonstrating that renewable energy can power Haiti cleanly and affordably while also addressing conditions of chronic poverty and stalled development. The project is one of many in the country developed through CGI’s Haiti Action Network — a forum that allows members to discuss ideas, forge partnerships, and coordinate their efforts in the country.
Commitment by: Onshore Technology Services In June 2011, Onshore Technology Services committed to creating 1,000 jobs over five years in two Missouri towns, Joplin and Macon. Onshore aimed to recruit and train underemployed and dislocated workers as information technologists, driving economic recovery in these rural towns. Recognizing their vital role in the recovery of these communities, Onshore also committed to recruiting women to fill at least 30 percent of these jobs. As a part of this commitment, and in an effort to create viable “job ecosystems,” Onshore aims to address the education, health care, housing, and childcare needs that often prevent individuals, particularly women, from joining the local workforce. Initially, Onshore focused its job creation effort on Joplin, Missouri, a town in which thousands of jobs were lost due to the May 2011 EF-5 tornado. Beyond Joplin and Macon Missouri, Onshore plans to replicate its success throughout rural America, eventually creating 12,000 jobs.
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 aims to reduce the number of malaria-related illnesses and deaths worldwide by expanding access to treatment, increasing the number of malaria-free areas around the world, transforming fever case management through the scale-up and effective use of rapid diagnostic tests, and improving the sustainability and efficiency of malaria financing. 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.
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. Supported by the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), the program brings together cities, bus technology companies, and local transport operators to test bus technology performance in city-specific driving conditions and duty cycles. Through the publication of results, it establishes the case for investment in hybrid and electric buses. 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. Bus testing has so far been conducted in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, and focused on comparing hybrid diesel-electric technology to conventional diesel technology. Results measured a range of factors from exhaust emissions to energy performance, following a rigorous test protocol based on simulating real-world driving conditions. Promising findings show that hybrid technology is more fuel efficient and produces fewer local air pollutants and greenhouse gases than conventional diesel buses.
With a dream to share food from their homeland with American households, Paula Rimer and Eric Shkolnik opened Crepini, a Brooklyn-based specialty food company in 2007. Four years later, the business had reached capacity in their small facility, and they sought out the Clinton Foundation’s Entrepreneur Mentoring Program to get help with the development of a strategy for continued growth. Volunteer mentor Bill Levine of Sarabeth’s Kitchen worked with Crepini to utilize tax credits that allowed them to open an expanded manufacturing space and introduced Paula and Eric to dozens of new industry connections and potential customers. Since moving into the new space, production output has doubled, revenue has increased by 39 percent, and Crepini has created five new jobs in their neighborhood