GP in the News

May 14, 2012 | IBM Press Release

 

In May 2012, a team of experts from IBM presented the Ghana Ministry of Health with a forward-looking blueprint to provide all Ghanaians with access to health care, while also improving the availability of medicines and reducing their cost. The engagement in Ghana was part of a larger partnership between USAID, IBM, and CDC Development Solutions to facilitate international corporate volunteerism through the Center of Excellence for International Corporate Volunteerism.

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LIONS@FRICA Partnership to Promote African Innovation and Entrepreneurship

At the World Economic Forum on Africa in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, high-level representatives from the U.S. Department of State, U.S. Agency for International Development, African Development Bank, Microsoft, Nokia, infoDev, DEMO, and the World Economic Forum launched a new partnership to promote innovation and entrepreneurship in Africa. The Liberalizing Innovation Opportunity Nations (LIONS@FRICA) partnership seeks to mobilize the knowledge, expertise and resources of leading public and private institutions to encourage and enhance Africa’s innovation ecosystem and to spur entrepreneurship across the continent.

 

 

May 5, 2012 | The Tico Times

 

At an event commemorating the milestone, President Laura Chinchilla challenged Intel to invest $500 million in Costa Rica over the next five years. In 1995, as Costa Rica faced diminishing foreign investment, the Costa Rican Investment Promotion Agency (CINDE) decided to chance it all. Read more about how Intel’s long-term investment in Costa Rica helped the country achieve sustainable development goals.

May 4, 2012 | Foreign Policy

 

In an interview for Foreign Policy, Samuel Loewenberg spoke with Shah about how he is reinventing USAID, an often-embattled agency charged with helping the world's poorest countries develop, while at the same time dealing with crises around the globe.

 

 

 

 

April 30, 2012 | The Huffington Post

 

Let's talk deal flow. The top investors from Silicon Valley to New York to London know that deal flow is the secret to getting the best returns. If a boat is financial capital, and deals are the fish, investors want to be floating in a river where the fish are jumping. It is no different in the developing world. After JP Morgan estimated in 2010 that the potential capital market for impact investing -- enterprises that would deliver positive social impact -- was between $400 billion and $1 trillion, many investors began to believe they could do well by doing good. Read more from this blog post by Maura O'Neill, Chief Innovation Officer and Senior Counselor to the Administrator at USAID.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: “USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures, or DIV, invests in breakthrough development solutions that truly have the potential to change millions of lives at a fraction of the usual cost. And now, through a new Global Development Alliance between USAID and the Skoll Foundation…we are dedicating more than $40 million to focus on scaling up game-changing innovations that are cost-effective and sustainable.”

 

Apr 28, 2012 | The Economist

 

In Tapachula, a furnace of a city in southern Mexico, people line up inside an air-conditioned branch of Banco Azteca to process their remittances. Last year Mexicans received an estimated $24 billion from friends and family working abroad, mainly in the United States, with which Mexico forms the world’s busiest remittance corridor. But a closer look at the Tapachulan queue shows how the remittance business is changing. Many are not Mexicans receiving cash from America, but migrant workers sending it back home to Guatemala or Honduras. Read more about global remittances flows.

 

 

April 13, 2012 | The Washington Post

 

President Obama promoted hemispheric trade as essential to America’s economic future in a speech in Tampa Friday that foreshadowed his agenda for a weekend summit in Colombia. Heading to a meeting with the hemisphere’s heads of state, Obama told an audience of dock workers and business owners gathered at the Port of Tampa that Latin America and the Caribbean, a region that has weathered the global downturn better than most, are a market of huge opportunity for U.S. exports.

 

December 11, 2011 | Dawn.com

 

From PCT now comes Sim Sim Hamara, an educational and capacity building series for children. This Pakistani adaptation of Sesame Street has been created by RPTW in collaboration with the Sesame Workshop, New York, and funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The project is the outcome of extensive research that spanned over a year.

 

December 7, 2011 | Center for Strategic and International Studies

 

The changing nature of international development has produced an increasing interest in the use of development finance instruments. As the availability of soft grant money decreases and there is an increasing acceptance of the central role of private-sector-led growth, official development assistance-led development is shifting to focus on investment and trade. In this context, the U.S. government must more effectively use its existing development finance instruments. The Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), U.S. Trade and Development Agency (USTDA), Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) encourage private-sector development while serving as instruments of U.S. national security and foreign policy, but, as currently conceived, are inadequate to meet the entire spectrum of challenges we face.

 

 

 

December 1, 2011 | The Hill’s Congress Blog

 

Today we are seeing nothing short of a historic entrepreneurial period of discovery for both long-neglected and newly threatening diseases, and it is critically important that we build on this momentum in the coming years. Millions of lives have been saved, and millions more depend on it. The story behind these advancements is little known. The story line can be traced to the creation of groups of innovative entrepreneurs who work on the front lines of disease prevention in organizations called Product Development Partnerships, or PDPs for short. These are great examples of public-private collaborations and they are starting to build deep pipelines for new drugs, vaccines, and diagnostic tools. 

 

November 25, 2011 | Special to CNN

 

On Black Friday, the apotheosis of consumerism and the celebration of private enterprise (entrepreneurial on-line marketers are targeting in-line consumers with ads sent to their cell phones while they wait to purchase goods in physical stores), it’s a good time to consider the power of harnessing private incentives to public goals.

 

November 1, 2011 | Center for Strategic and International Studies

 

This report examines opportunities and challenges for using public-private partnerships in development, specifically through the lens of the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Millennium Challenge Corporation. Current concerns are how the U.S. government can improve its ability to partner with the private sector and how lessons for creating and maintaining relationships with the private sector can be institutionalized in order to be able to set up partnerships or projects that work to scale and then make them sustainable.

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