Partnership is an essential feature of our work at The Rockefeller Foundation. Building resilience often requires bringing together unlikely people and organizations from across sectors to collaborate on bold and innovative solutions.
Today at World Water Week, we welcomed Zurich Insurance Group (Zurich) as the first private sector partner to join the Global Resilience Partnership. Zurich will join efforts with the Resilience Partnership to support a new Global Resilience Challenge Water Window.
Water-related shocks and stresses were a key element highlighted recently in several of the problem statements developed by teams during the inaugural Global Resilience Challenge. The Water Window, to be launched in early 2016, will test, invest in and scale locally-driven, high impact solutions that address a diverse set of water-related challenges affecting one or more the GRP target regions—the Horn of Africa, Sahel and South and Southeast Asia. Zurich’s generous $10 million commitment will fund solutions that build flood resilience, especially those that enhance its global flood resilience program launched in 2013.
As the first private sector partner, Zurich Insurance Group’s thought leadership, action research and modeling expand our collective opportunity to innovate and grow the impact of sustainable approaches to building resilience in communities most vulnerable to floods. Zurich will also encourage other corporations to join the Water Window for different tracks beyond flooding.
Partnerships like this exemplify a core value of forging strategic alliances between the public, non-profit, and private sector for more resilient communities across the globe. Only then will we be able to realize the dividends of investing in resilience.
We are thrilled about this collaboration and its promise of helping to build more resilient communities and look forward to welcoming more corporate partners in the months to come.
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