OREANDA-NEWS. September 20, 2016. At the Concordia Summit’s The Trillion Dollar Challenge: A New Business Model for Investing in Social Impact and Development today in New York City, Deputy Secretary Blinken spoke on the importance of leveraging public-private partnerships to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). As part of this commitment, Deputy Secretary Blinken announced Global Partnerships Week 2017 (GPW), which will take place from March 6-10, 2017, and an SDG Accelerator to follow in summer 2017.

GPW is held annually to recognize and celebrate the critical role public-private partnerships play in promoting diplomacy, development, and peacebuilding around the world. Led by the Secretary’s Office of Global Partnerships (S/GP) in collaboration with the U.S. Global Development Lab at the U.S. Agency for International Development, Concordia, and PeaceTech Lab, a non-profit organization created by the U.S. Institute of Peace, this year’s summit will concentrate on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

GPW activities and events, held during one week each March, serve to encourage the creative collaboration needed to tackle global challenges. They promote innovation and recognize the achievements of existing partnerships. The kickoff event will be a full day conference on March 6, 2017, in Washington, D.C., to give public-private partnership practitioners from the government, private sector, and non-governmental organizations the opportunity to discuss common challenges and best practices in building partnerships.

S/GP encourages any organization or individual to organize local events that highlight and support the impact of cross-sector collaboration. Registered events are highlighted on the GPW website and are promoted to an international audience of partnership practitioners. Past GPW events have ranged from large scale panels and conferences to small networking gatherings and webinars.

The Secretary’s Office of Global Partnerships is also partnering with the Unreasonable Group to launch an accelerator dedicated exclusively to supporting ventures uniquely positioned to address the SDGs. In the summer of 2017, 17 innovators will spend 17 days focused on scaling up their operational ventures to address the Sustainable Development Goals.