AIDS
The Clinton Presidential Foundation has signed formal understandings with the Caribbean Community, an organization that represents 15 countries, and the African nations of Mozambique and Rwanda. The foundation pledged to help those countries negotiate with pharmaceutical companies to obtain patented and generic drugs, to send specialists to provide health-care training, and to assist in expanding health services.
Mr. Clinton and former South African President Nelson Mandela are co-chairs of the International AIDS Trust, which was founded by Mr. Clinton’s AIDS “czar” during his administration, Sandra L. Thurman. The group focuses in part on educating world leaders, governments, businesses, and philanthropies about what it says is a critical need for stepped-up spending on preventing and treating AIDS.
Citizen service
With City Year, a Boston group that was a model for AmeriCorps, the former president has created a public-service program, the Clinton Democracy Fellows. Through it, young leaders from other countries will come to the United States for training and return home with ideas for starting their own national-service efforts. An inaugural class of 11 fellows, from South Africa, just completed training and arrived back home as part of Mr. Clinton’s promise to Mr. Mandela to help build a “South AfriCorps” program.
Disaster relief
Following a devastating earthquake in Gujarat, India, early last year, Mr. Clinton was a key figure behind the creation of the American India Foundation, in New York, which was formed to raise money to replace houses, hospitals, and schools wiped out by the disaster. Under Mr. Clinton’s guidance, the charity has broadened its work to include the promotion of social and economic change and the operation of its own national-service program -- sending Indian-Americans and others on months-long fellowships to India.
Economic development
Mr. Clinton is promoting the economies of poor nations using his contacts in government and business. For example, during his trip last month to Africa, leaders of Mozambique asked for the former president’s help in attracting outside investments. In Ghana, Mr. Clinton helped inaugurate the Foundation for Building of Capital of the Poor, an antipoverty organization that will educate private investors and push for property-law changes designed to help the poor. Mr. Clinton promotes the policies of the development economist Hernando de Soto and his Institute for Liberty and Democracy, in Peru.
In Harlem, where he opened his office last year, Mr. Clinton has helped create teams of consultants who volunteer to help small businesses run by minorities survive and thrive. With the Robin Hood Foundation and the Harlem Children’s Zone, the former president has worked to let poor people know about the availability of the federal earned-income tax credit, which is designed to help offset Social Security payroll taxes paid by low-income working families. Mr. Clinton also has helped the nonprofit organizations Operation Hope and VH-1’s Save the Music bring financial and music education to Harlem public schools.
Promoting tolerance
After the September 11 terrorist attacks, the former president co-sponsored a conference on Islam -- with the Georgetown University Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding and the New York University School of Law -- to shed light on America’s relationship with the Muslim world. Mr. Clinton, who as president guided Protestant and Catholic leaders in Northern Ireland toward a peace accord, is helping the Clinton Peace Center in that country become a locus for conflict resolution for countries worldwide. Last month, the former president visited a village in Rwanda to help encourage the long-feuding Tutsi and Hutu tribes to work together on economic issues.
September 11 victims
With his co-chair, former Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, Mr. Clinton helped raise more than $100-million for the Families of Freedom Scholarship Fund to provide educational assistance for children of those killed or permanently disabled as a result of the terrorist attacks.