Western Union and the Western Union Foundation have made a commitment to the non profit organisation Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) to offer innovative services for expanding financial know-how and access to essential financial services for the world’s migrant and underserved communities.

Western Union Foundation’s signature giving program ‘Our World, Our Family program’ is a USD 50 million, five-year commitment reaching an estimated 200 million people who live and work outside their country of origin. The aim of the program is to equip migrants and the communities they leave behind with the financial skills, knowledge and resource essential to fight poverty. The program contains specific element implementations, namely Our World Gives, Our World Learns, Our World Strives and Our World Speaks.

Primary participant audiences will include Western Union's network of 355,000 Agent locations, more than 5,800 employees, corporate and NGO partners, and governments, many of the 200 million migrants around the world. In the next year, this program will reach at least 285,000 people, and 375,000 in the next two years.  

Together with international humanitarian aid and development charitable organisation Mercy Corps., Western Union will introduce new program elements and implement limited-scale pilot efforts, empowering financially disadvantaged migrant workers to better manage their earnings, save for the future, and ultimately generate wealth from their labour by providing personal financial management training and information campaigns.

The company has formed a Western Union Digital Ventures group to develop new and creative ways to deliver remittances on a global basis. In aligning with m-banking and m-wallet initiatives, the company intends to provide a new channel for moving low denomination remittances, with an emphasis on those less-than USD 200, in greater volumes to more people.

As part of the program, Western Union and the GSM Association (GSMA) are working together to develop a commercial and technical framework that mobile operators can use to deploy services that enable consumers to send and receive low-denomination, high-frequency money transfers using their mobile phones. In Q2 2008, Western Union announced the first three mobile operators to participate in this initiative: Globe Telecom, Smart Communications, and Bharti Airtel. Western Union will develop strategic alliances to introduce or support mobile-based initiatives for underserved communities in more than 15 countries in Africa, India, Asia Pacific and Latin America. At full deployment, people will be able to send and receive funds three ways: cash-to-mobile, mobile-to-cash and to mobile-to-mobile.

Western Union will offer a number of opportunities for engagement among CGI members. The company invites other members to join together in forming global giving circles targeted to support on-the-ground needs of migrants and the communities they have left behind. The CGI was founded by former US president Bill Clinton and convenes global leaders to devise and implement innovative services to some of the world's most pressing challenges. The initiative culminates in an annual conference, at which each invited guest must make a specific commitment to address one of the focus areas discussed. CGI staff then monitors the progress and success of these commitments throughout the year.