The Office of Commercial and Business Affairs (CBA) plays a major role in coordinating trade and investment matters to support U.S. firms doing business overseas. Our mission is to engage U.S. government resources to assist and promote U.S. business interests overseas, and to ensure that private sector business concerns are fully integrated into U.S. foreign and economic policy.

Commercial Diplomacy:
CBA coordinates State Department advocacy on behalf of American businesses. We provide assistance in opening markets, leveling the playing field, protecting intellectual property rights, and resolving trade and investment disputes. CBA works with U.S. Government trade promotion partners and U.S. embassies around the world to support American businesses overseas by providing commercial information and identifying market opportunities for American firms, advocating on their behalf, engaging them via teleconference with U.S. Ambassadors overseas, and encouraging corporate social responsibility. CBA can answer your questions and provide information on important issues such as dealing with corruption and bribery in overseas markets, U.S. export controls on sensitive equipment and technologies, and business-related visas for employees, partners and clients of U.S. firms.

Entrepreneurship:
To advance entrepreneurship promotion abroad, Global Entrepreneurship Program (GEP) works with U.S. embassies and partners to promote new programs, such as generating new angel investment networks, entrepreneurship delegations, mentoring collaborations, global celebrations, and incorporating the women’s entrepreneurship portfolio in order to promote the success of potential high growth, high impact women-owned enterprises.

President Obama’s June 2009 Cairo speech, "A New Beginning," and the Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship in April 2010, established global entrepreneurship as a vital element in our foreign economic and development policy.

CBA's GEP is a vehicle to catalyze, coordinate, and convene with both non-government partners (such as NGOs, universities, foundations and the private sector) and U.S. government programs, principally with Department of Commerce, USAID, OPIC, SBA and the Millennium Challenge Corporation.