COMMITMENTS, NEWS AND ANALYSES OF
THE CLINTON GLOBAL INITIATIVE 2014
Summary Notes from CGI 2014: A Story of Challenge and Progress Around the Globe
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - 27 SEPTEMBER 2014
The 2014 Clinton Global Initiative marks more than a decade of socially responsible commitment-making and partnership-creating on the part of corporate, government, and NGO organizations. Hillary Clinton, in the opening day remarks, praised those commitments, which have now totaled more than 3,100 since the first CGI. These 3,100 commitments have been valued at one hundred billion in U.S. dollars and have impacted more than 430 million individuals across more than 180 countries. 44 million people have received education as a part of fulfilled commitments. 27 million people have better access to clean water. 2.7 metric tons of CO2 have been cut. The percentage of commitments involving cross-sector partnerships has risen from 65% to 90%, and commitments now have a significantly higher success rate as a result. But Bill and Hillary see no end in sight-- from the opening to the closing, the two of them urged donors to consider the issues that remain to be tackled, while thanking donors wholeheartedly for the accomplishments they have made in the past and for those they continue to work on every day.
In the pre-plenary address, Hillary Clinton explained that the purpose of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) was to get corporations and governments on board with, connecting with, and investing in the missions of civil society. Through the three day conference, a series of moving appeals and promises were made toward this purpose. The King of Jordan gave a powerful speech asking for funds to help place Syrian refugees that have crossed into his country into homes where they can work toward a future and become a part of a community. The Prime Minister of Haiti asked for investment in education and educated job development to halt the staggering brain drain that has stalled his country's progress. Donors were quick to respond, although Jordan and Haiti both required roughly 1.5 billion USD and are both still in need of the remainder of that amount. Six teams of business students, each of which had developed a "social business" plan to solve a major global problem relating to non-communicable diseases, competed for a grant, but the presentations were each so moving and promising that Bill Clinton personally appealed to the audience for them to seek the teams out in private and give full funding to each of them, to which the audience gave a standing ovation. In the closing address, one of the participating CEOs donated fifty million dollars to enriching education in America.
The confidence about the future of the world demonstrated across the board by foundation presidents, company CEOs, and nonprofit entrepreneurs was startling, and each had so much data behind that confidence, and such thorough knowledge of their own sector, that I found it overwhelmingly difficult to document each one of them. Having covered this conference from start to finish, and having been a small part of it myself thanks to a generous invitation, it is impossible for me to return home without, I think, a permanently increased sense of optimism regarding world affairs.
Some of this confidence came from the great movements forward that have gripped this world in recent years, with most of those movements being in the information and technology sectors. Hindering this confidence was the continued devastation of both communicable and non-communicable diseases, the reluctance of extreme poverty to disappear from sections of the globe, the growing energy gap, and the likelihood of clean water and sanitation becoming more difficult, not less difficult, in the years ahead. In the face of such a long list of remaining challenges, world leaders at this conference hardly even stopped to blink. It seemed obvious to them that if the audience that was convened here for the 2014 conference continued to make similar commitments, and continued to grow in size, that such problems could be solved through innovative solutions, strategic partnerships, and wise investment policies.
President Barack Obama, making an appearance on the second day of the conference, was actually less optimistic than most of the attendees, delivering a speech that stressed the prevailing importance of security and the need to make sacrifices relating to human rights in the pursuit of security. Yet he also sought to empower the citizen, saying, in a rather moving moment of the speech, "The most important title is not President, or Prime Minister; it is citizen." He announced his issuance of a memorandum that would seek to develop more intimate partnerships between government and civil society organizations, following an announcement by Bill Clinton that quantitative analyses had found such partnerships to be far more successful than isolated government-only undertakings in the realm of forward social progress.
Obama's speech was preceded by a comical yet sincere performance by Matt Damon, who co-manages an organization called Water.org. Damon cited the statistic that every twenty-one seconds, a child dies from a preventable water-borne illness. Today, more than 740 million people around the globe lack access to fresh water. That means that more people have access to cell phones than to clean water. Damon's plea to mobilize action around clean water and sanitation was followed the next day by Bill Clinton's own appeal to the audience, in which he listed access to clean water as one of the major focus areas for next year's convention.
Pepsi is one company that had begun to get on board with the clean water initiative. Pepsi announced this year that they are expanding a program that, in 2015, will deal out three million USD in loans, not charity, for clean water initiatives in India. In 2014, 90% of these kinds of loans were repaid. Pepsi believes that this evidence points toward the fact that fresh water access does not need to be a charity endeavor-- it can be considered a social investment in society with an expected actual financial return.
One can also look at the numbers on the opposite side of things, however. One billion people are illiterate today. The number of those infected by Ebola in Liberia doubles approximately every fifteen days. Non-communicable diseases, in 2015, will kill approximately thirty million people, more than any other category of causes of death. The Islamic State is able to offer fighters a salary that is high enough (at $1,500.00 per month) to draw mercenaries from as far away as China and America. And yes, every twenty-one seconds, a child dies from a preventable disease because he or she does not have access to clean water. These facts were reiterated throughout the conference in a cool rational manner, with the firm and resolute belief that each one of them can be overcome with the careful application of innovative and sustainable solutions. Such immense problems cannot be solved simply with another three thousand member commitments or CSR initiatives. They will require concerted action on the part of a still greater and more powerful network of world leaders. But the members and world leaders present this year demonstrated remarkable and unwavering confidence that such a network has already begun to form.
The 2014 Clinton Global Initiative marks more than a decade of socially responsible commitment-making and partnership-creating on the part of corporate, government, and NGO organizations. Hillary Clinton, in the opening day remarks, praised those commitments, which have now totaled more than 3,100 since the first CGI. These 3,100 commitments have been valued at one hundred billion in U.S. dollars and have impacted more than 430 million individuals across more than 180 countries. 44 million people have received education as a part of fulfilled commitments. 27 million people have better access to clean water. 2.7 metric tons of CO2 have been cut. The percentage of commitments involving cross-sector partnerships has risen from 65% to 90%, and commitments now have a significantly higher success rate as a result. But Bill and Hillary see no end in sight-- from the opening to the closing, the two of them urged donors to consider the issues that remain to be tackled, while thanking donors wholeheartedly for the accomplishments they have made in the past and for those they continue to work on every day.
In the pre-plenary address, Hillary Clinton explained that the purpose of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) was to get corporations and governments on board with, connecting with, and investing in the missions of civil society. Through the three day conference, a series of moving appeals and promises were made toward this purpose. The King of Jordan gave a powerful speech asking for funds to help place Syrian refugees that have crossed into his country into homes where they can work toward a future and become a part of a community. The Prime Minister of Haiti asked for investment in education and educated job development to halt the staggering brain drain that has stalled his country's progress. Donors were quick to respond, although Jordan and Haiti both required roughly 1.5 billion USD and are both still in need of the remainder of that amount. Six teams of business students, each of which had developed a "social business" plan to solve a major global problem relating to non-communicable diseases, competed for a grant, but the presentations were each so moving and promising that Bill Clinton personally appealed to the audience for them to seek the teams out in private and give full funding to each of them, to which the audience gave a standing ovation. In the closing address, one of the participating CEOs donated fifty million dollars to enriching education in America.
The confidence about the future of the world demonstrated across the board by foundation presidents, company CEOs, and nonprofit entrepreneurs was startling, and each had so much data behind that confidence, and such thorough knowledge of their own sector, that I found it overwhelmingly difficult to document each one of them. Having covered this conference from start to finish, and having been a small part of it myself thanks to a generous invitation, it is impossible for me to return home without, I think, a permanently increased sense of optimism regarding world affairs.
Some of this confidence came from the great movements forward that have gripped this world in recent years, with most of those movements being in the information and technology sectors. Hindering this confidence was the continued devastation of both communicable and non-communicable diseases, the reluctance of extreme poverty to disappear from sections of the globe, the growing energy gap, and the likelihood of clean water and sanitation becoming more difficult, not less difficult, in the years ahead. In the face of such a long list of remaining challenges, world leaders at this conference hardly even stopped to blink. It seemed obvious to them that if the audience that was convened here for the 2014 conference continued to make similar commitments, and continued to grow in size, that such problems could be solved through innovative solutions, strategic partnerships, and wise investment policies.
President Barack Obama, making an appearance on the second day of the conference, was actually less optimistic than most of the attendees, delivering a speech that stressed the prevailing importance of security and the need to make sacrifices relating to human rights in the pursuit of security. Yet he also sought to empower the citizen, saying, in a rather moving moment of the speech, "The most important title is not President, or Prime Minister; it is citizen." He announced his issuance of a memorandum that would seek to develop more intimate partnerships between government and civil society organizations, following an announcement by Bill Clinton that quantitative analyses had found such partnerships to be far more successful than isolated government-only undertakings in the realm of forward social progress.
Obama's speech was preceded by a comical yet sincere performance by Matt Damon, who co-manages an organization called Water.org. Damon cited the statistic that every twenty-one seconds, a child dies from a preventable water-borne illness. Today, more than 740 million people around the globe lack access to fresh water. That means that more people have access to cell phones than to clean water. Damon's plea to mobilize action around clean water and sanitation was followed the next day by Bill Clinton's own appeal to the audience, in which he listed access to clean water as one of the major focus areas for next year's convention.
Pepsi is one company that had begun to get on board with the clean water initiative. Pepsi announced this year that they are expanding a program that, in 2015, will deal out three million USD in loans, not charity, for clean water initiatives in India. In 2014, 90% of these kinds of loans were repaid. Pepsi believes that this evidence points toward the fact that fresh water access does not need to be a charity endeavor-- it can be considered a social investment in society with an expected actual financial return.
One can also look at the numbers on the opposite side of things, however. One billion people are illiterate today. The number of those infected by Ebola in Liberia doubles approximately every fifteen days. Non-communicable diseases, in 2015, will kill approximately thirty million people, more than any other category of causes of death. The Islamic State is able to offer fighters a salary that is high enough (at $1,500.00 per month) to draw mercenaries from as far away as China and America. And yes, every twenty-one seconds, a child dies from a preventable disease because he or she does not have access to clean water. These facts were reiterated throughout the conference in a cool rational manner, with the firm and resolute belief that each one of them can be overcome with the careful application of innovative and sustainable solutions. Such immense problems cannot be solved simply with another three thousand member commitments or CSR initiatives. They will require concerted action on the part of a still greater and more powerful network of world leaders. But the members and world leaders present this year demonstrated remarkable and unwavering confidence that such a network has already begun to form.
President Barack Obama Announces Memorandum to Support International Civil Society at the Plenary Address of the Clinton Global Initiative 2014:NEW YORK, NEW YORK - 23 SEPTEMBER 2014 --
President Obama today announced the issuance of a memorandum to support international civil society by easing up the process of large international grants for donors in America, and by proclaiming that government organizations across the board will engage civil society organizations more frequently and to a much greater degree. The President highlighted human rights activists and civil society engineers around the world, calling them from the audience and listing their accomplishments. He also listed activists serving prison terms abroad and affirmed America's and his own personal support for their struggle for human rights. Obama's announcements were met with wide applause throughout the audience. |
President Barack Obama: "The most important title is not President, or Prime Minister; it is citizen."NEW YORK, NEW YORK - 23 SEPTEMBER 2014 - In an inspiring delivery to an audience of civil society philanthropists, activists, and journalists from across corporate, government, and nonprofit sectors, President Obama praised the citizen as the highest title of honor among all people. The citizen, Obama said, created democracy, forced the abolition of slavery, and today works to guarantee and secure human rights around the globe. This is the citizen's most important charge going forward-- to defend human rights in every place where they are threatened.
"The most important title is not President, or Prime Minister," Obama proclaimed in his opening remarks, "it is citizen." |
What is a Commitment to Action?
A Commitment to Action is a specific, measurable, and set commitment to improve the social and economic well-being of a particular area, a particular population, or the world at large. Commitments span from empowering women and lessening inequality to investing in small businesses and promoting open job markets. Further hot topics on this year's agenda include the refugee crisis in Jordan, food and water insecurity, sanitation, and sustainable growth in both rural and urban sectors. Commitments may expect a financial return but need not always do so. CSR, social investment, and philanthropy are all common endeavors at the Clinton Global Initiative.
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