New Delhi:  The Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) and FACEBOOK today announced their partnership to augment the Millennium Alliance (MA) initiative. The MA is an inclusive platform to leverage Indian creativity, expertise, and resources to identify, scale and expand the outreach of 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.

Facebook has joined hands with FICCI as an Outreach and Knowledge partner to support and expand the development of the social enterprise sector in India. Both share the commitment to promote replication and scale of the selected social enterprise innovations across the South Asia and Africa regions in the identified priority areas of sanitation, education, healthcare, clean energy and agriculture.

Facebook and FICCI together will also engage in organizing regular workshops & webinars for shortlisted applicants to promote the effectiveness of Facebook as a tool for promoting business and social innovations apart from helping them reach out and connect to relevant resources globally.

The Millennium Alliance (MA) was launched in July 2012 jointly by the Technology Development Board (Department of Science and Technology, Government of India), 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. ICICI Foundation for Inclusive Growth, ICCo Cooperation, UKAID, WISH Foundation & World Bank subsequently came on board as Program Partners. The MA aims to create significant developmental impact at the base of the pyramid population. So far MA has funded Sixty two projects, dispersing close to Rs. 55 crore in its key focus sectors.