The Clinton Global Intiative (CGI) have just held the 2008 Annual Meeting in New York. The meeting brought together 80 current and former heads of state, hundreds of top CEOs and non-profit leaders, major philanthropists, and 10 of the last 16 Nobel Peace Laureates “to examine some of today’s most pressing global challenges and transform that awareness into tangible action”. This year the 3 day meeting focused on education, engery and climate change, global health and poverty.

You can hear/ watch all of the interesting debates on the CGI website. Some of the topics that were covered are:

Education

• Providing real choices: what works for at-risk adolescent girls and boys?
• Beyond microfinance: strengthening business and entrepreneurship education for women in emerging economies
• Expanding the school-health connection

Global Health

• Expanding the Global Health Workforce
• Ensuring a healthy start: maternal and child

Poverty Alleviation

• Food security and poverty
• Improving livelihoods in the wake of conflict

Energy and Climate Change

• Renewables revolution
• Clean transport

Not only the CGI members dicuss the above topics but they also made commitments on how they were going to put into practice some of the solutions. One of the commitments was to create a social Metrics Platform to be known as the Portfolio Data Management System (PDMS). PDMS which is due for launch in January 2009 will provide social entreprenuers, enterprises and non-profit organisations with a tool to measure their social, financial and operational data. This commitment was made by the Acumen Fund in partnership with Goolge.org, Salesforce.com Foundation, Lodestar Foundation and the Skoll Foundation. The Platform will be made available free to non-profits from Salesforce.com and at a 80% discount to for-profits.

The Acumen Fund believe that this tool can be used as an industry standard for mapping social impact and not only drive meaningfull colaboration around social impact evaluation but also help to create benchmarking across institutions. For more information about the PDMS visit the full statement of commitment on the CGI website or read an article about the product on the Business Week website.