Advancing Social Goals Together: The Power of Public & Private Partnerships

At the launch of the first two HP World on Wheels digital inclusion and learning labs in February, Rajiv Srivastava, Managing Director of HP India, stood side-by-side with Dr. Dinesh Tyagi, CEO, Common Service Center, India’s Ministry of Communication & Information Technology. The two men cut a symbolic red ribbon strung across the doorway of a learning lab, marking the official start of a journey that is expected to impact more than 15 million people over the next six years.

HP World on Wheels, first announced at the Global Citizen Festival India in November 2016, builds on HP’s multi-pronged support of the Indian government’s Digital India, which includes a range of programs that advance data digitization, cloud-based e-learning, and digital literacy across the country.

The joint ribbon cutting ceremony demonstrated the powerful impact that governments and business can have when they join forces to drive social change. For HP, this collaboration is helping advance our objective to reinvent learning and digital inclusion. It’s this shared value approach to driving good that enables us to focus our efforts where we can have the greatest impact.    

Education is a critical business vertical for HP — not only as a core market for our technology, but because quality education is vital to powering the next generation of inventors, leaders, and future employees. Advancing quality education is also one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. We’re driven by the knowledge that, as we help build better education systems, we’re helping achieve meaningful outcomes for us all, supporting sustained economic growth and enabling more peaceful, stable societies.

As a global multinational company present in more than 170 countries and territories, we know our business actions can have a tremendous impact. Yet, we also know when we collaborate with governments, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), for-profit companies, and others around a common social goal, we are better able to scale our reach, bring our strategic vision to life faster, and drive even greater impact for people and communities across the world.

Here are a few examples:

— Mashrou3i is the result of a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) of the HP Foundation, United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Government of Italy. The program started in 2013 to help address the significant challenge of youth unemployment in Tunisia—where an estimated 40 percent of young graduates were unable to find work. The three-year pilot trained over 12,000 people in business and IT skills training, and helped create more than 1,250 jobs, including 160 start-up businesses. With $14 million USD in additional funding from the partners, the second phase of the program, launched in January, aims to reach an additional 25,000 aspiring and existing entrepreneurs, and create over 6,000 more private sector jobs.

— HP Learning Studios are creative, collaborative learning spaces where students drive the design and fabrication of products to address real-world issues that matter to them. Working in collaboration with Digital Promise Global, Global Business Coalition for Education, Microsoft, and Intel, we’re opening six HP Learning Studios in Lebanon and Jordan to help Syrian refugee youths learn in-demand skills such as design thinking, three-dimensional design, and social entrepreneurship. These six, focused exclusively on serving the needs of refugees, are in addition to the 61 Learning Studios operating in the US, Canada, UK, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Italy, Spain, Australia, and New Zealand.

— Several hundred people—including more than 300 children, ages 8 to 12—collect recyclable materials at the Truitier landfill in Haiti. HP joined with Timberland, Team Tassy, and ACOP (Association des Collectors des objets en Plastic) on an initiative lead by Thread that will improve the conditions at Truitier — and the lives of those who work there. The program provides educational opportunities, physical exams, and safety and sanitation trainings to the children, as well as job training for adult workers. The program partners are also making investments in entrepreneurs, microenterprises, and small-to-medium enterprises in the targeted neighborhoods to support economic growth. HP will purchase recycled plastic made from raw materials collected at the Truitier landfill to manufacture new HP print cartridges via our current closed-loop recycling program.

These public-private partnerships are vital to helping us advance our corporate vision to create technology that makes life better for everyone, everywhere. And there’s another type of partnership that’s also vital to advancing our vision — partnering with influential people and organizations that inspire, advocate, and enable action, such as Global Citizen.

Since 2013, HP has been a proud supporter and partner of Global Citizen. Working together with Global Citizen, HP is able to amplify our impact by reaching a passionate, committed, and engaged global audience of millions who share a common commitment to make the world better. Global Citizen is a powerful force for driving awareness and action — both inside our company, as we set and align around commitments that help us advance our goals, as well as across the Global Citizen community, as we work to create access to quality education for everyone, everywhere.

There’s an African proverb that says, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” But at HP, we believe that if you align people around a common purpose, you can both accelerate and scale progress. Our decades of partnerships have shown this to be true—and as Global Citizens, we collectively prove it to the world every day.