Opportunities for Partnerships

The International Finance Corporation (private sector arm of the World Bank Group) offers direct technical assistance that helps establish public-private partnerships through which governments can obtain increased services under budget constraints, while benefiting from private sector expertise, management and finance; or extend the reach and quality of their public services through large-scale privatization projects.

Using both the public and private sector as resources, Equator Ventures invests in small and medium enterprise projects, at all stages of development, by integrating loans and capacity development grants. Five core principles act as the driving force behind Equator Ventures: integrating biodiversity conservation and poverty alleviation into enterprise delivery; enhancing capacity for impact, scaling-up, and repayment; measuring and reporting on challenges and successes for broad-based learning; building an active public-private community that is supportive of environmentally sustainable entrepreneurship; and achieving financial sustainability.  Loans range from US$30,000 and US$500,000

Millennium Promise has designed and implemented the Millennium Villages initiative in 78 villages from 10 countries of sub-Saharan Africa. Through such community-led development projects, Millennium Promise works towards achieving the Millennium Development Goal of eradicating extreme poverty worldwide by 2025. At the cost of only $110 per person per year and by targeting nutrition, agriculture, education, gender equality, health, environment, water, and infrastructure, Millennium Villages have already made impressive steps towards ending poverty.  

Projecto de Saúde em Lisboa (PROSALIS) is a family oriented non-profit organization that works with the social sector and in health care, providing prevention, treatment, and social and professional placement for drug addicts and other impoverished communities. PROSALIS has developed a number of programs including after school programs that support children from problematic social and family contexts. Other programs include workshops, internship programs, a center for treatment, and a food distribution programme.

The World Bank Group offers a broad range of advisory and consulting services to private-sector investors, businesses and client-country governments. These services provide access to knowledge and expertise related to small and medium enterprise expansion, institutional capacity building for investment promotion, policies and practices that foster trade and investment and more. All are designed to improve and sustain a developing country's business climate and its ability to attract and retain foreign direct investment, as well as give investors and businesses the tools and information to make sound investment decisions.

The Government of the Republic of Korea has provided US$400,000 to the African Millennium Village to be established in Madagascar. The village of Sambaina in Madagascar has already been identified by Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, head of the Earth Institute, Columbia University, and head of also the Millennium Project of the United Nations. The Earth Institute will soon start to design the project in Sambaina, Madagascar, and make the project operational.

Country ownership of the development agenda is a key principle of the World Bank's approach to reducing poverty and inequity for people in low and middle income countries. This principle underpins the Bank's emphasis on broad-based stakeholder participation in development, as well as its recognition of civil society organizations as key partners in the development efforts. Created in 1983, the Small Grants Program is one of the few global programs of the World Bank that directly funds civil society organizations.

Opportunity International was recently awarded a $50 million, 10-year grant to build microfinance banks in sub-Saharan Africa. The family foundation providing the grant has challenged Opportunity to match its funding with funds from organizations such as USAID, IFAD, IFC, the World Bank, the United Nations and major corporations and foundations who fund microfinance. In the last 6 years, Opportunity has built 12 commercial microfinance institutions in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America -- and plans to build 2 microfinance banks per year over the next ten years. One of the Targeted African countries for new banking operations includes (...) Madagascar. Each bank will offer a full suite of financial services tailored to the needs of the poor within the country and work to expand services through a multitude of "points of sale," including satellite branches, ATMs, point-of-sale devices placed in markets and farm shops, and cell phones. Opportunity's entry and expansion strategy will include greenfield startups, transformation of NGO MFIs, and consolidation of non-profit MFIs into the banks Opportunity establishes.

On the eve of a major White House summit on malaria, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation committed $83.5 million in new grants to combat the disease, which claims more than one million lives every year.(...) The upcoming White House malaria summit, hosted by President Bush and First Lady Laura Bush, will convene 250 political leaders, scientists, and advocates to discuss new opportunities to combat malaria globally and kick off new public-private efforts to address the disease.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's richest charity, joined with the Rockefeller Foundation yesterday to launch a new development initiative for sub-Saharan Africa that they said would revolutionize food production and reduce hunger and poverty for tens of millions of people. (...) Sponsors of the new "Alliance for a Green Revolution" said yesterday they are looking for a more systematic, long-term solution to African hunger. (...) Although the Gates/Rockefeller programme will be available throughout Africa, (...) the partners are still studying which 10 to 20 countries to select for initial funding.

A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to collaborate on capacity development and poverty reduction in Africa was signed on 4 November 2005 by Prof. Firmino Mucavele, NEPAD Chief Executive, and Prof. Andrew Gidamis, Executive Director of the African Institute for Capacity Development (AICAD), based in Kenya.

The Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA) has partnered with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and the NEPAD Secretariat in a new effort that will deliver financial management and administration skills to state institutions tasked with development in countries of the Southern African Development Community (SADC).