World Bank, FICCI join hands for innovation solutions

New Delhi:In order to leverage Indian creativity, expertise, and resources to identify and scale innovative solutions, the FICCI and the World Bank on Monday announced their partnership to advance the Millennium Alliance (MA) initiative.

"The MA is an inclusive platform to leverage Indian creativity, expertise, and resources to identify and scale innovative solutions being developed and tested in India to address development challenges that will benefit base of the pyramid populations across India and the world," an official statement said.

The agreement was signed by FICCI secretary general A. Didar Singh and World Bank country director (India) Onno Ruhl to formalize a shared commitment to support sustainable and scalable innovative solutions in the identified priority areas of sanitation, education, healthcare, clean energy and agriculture.

The World Bank and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) have come together in a knowledge partnership to support the development of the social enterprise sector in India, and to promote replication and scale of the social enterprise innovations across the South Asia and Africa regions.

The MA was launched in July 2012 jointly by the Technology Development Board (Department of Science and Technology, Government of India); United States Agency for International Development (USAID)and FICCI to recognize India's role as a global innovation laboratory, by identifying, testing and scaling solutions that leverage private and public sector resources and expertise to reduce the cost and increase the reach of development improvements in India and around the world.