OPIC mobilized private capital to help solve critical development challenges and in doing so, advanced the foreign policy of the United States and national security objectives.

By working with the U.S. private sector, OPIC helped U.S. businesses gain footholds in emerging markets, catalyzing revenues, jobs, and growth opportunities both at home and abroad.

OPIC helped U.S. investors protect their investments in a variety of situations, including political violence, expropriation or other government interference, and currency inconvertibility.

OPIC had increasingly focused on projects that encouraged the use of renewable resources, which represented not only an urgent global need but also a significant investment opportunity.

This initiative built upon the Power Africa Project launched during the Obama administration that committed to spending $1.5 billion in energy investments on the continent over a five-year span.

[citation needed] OPIC projects had to meet congressionally mandated requirements regarding the protection of the environment, social impacts, health, and safety.

Accordingly, the Marshall Plan authorized the U.S. government to ensure private U.S. investors against the risk that earnings generated overseas in foreign currencies might not be convertible into U.S. dollars.

[5] The IPIAC in the report recommended the organization of an overseas private enterprise development corporation of the United States and also funded by it, as responsive to the Javits Amendment to the 1968 Foreign Assistance Act.

Even opponents of foreign aid agree, I feel sure, that the burden of our international development program can and should be shifted increasingly from public to private resources.

The Administration's proposal to set up a Corporation has as its basic objective stimulation of American businessmen into examining the possibility of profitable and productive enterprises in countries hungry for development.

[OPIC is the] first really big initiative that has come along in the foreign aid field almost since it began, which goes back to 1948 and 1949 ... this corporation will for the first time apply business methods and business accounting procedures to the business operations of project development, investment, insurance, guarantees and direct lending—that is, to private activities which are sensitively and directly geared into the development of the less-developed areas which we propose to help in the foreign aid program.Congress created OPIC in 1969 through an amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act, and the agency began operations in 1971, during the Nixon administration,[6] with a portfolio of $8.4 billion in political risk insurance and $169 million in loan guaranties.

In a special message to Congress in 1971, President Nixon stated that OPIC's establishment will help "give new direction to U.S. private investment abroad ... and provide new focus to our foreign assistance effort.

In the 2000s, Friends of the Earth; Greenpeace; and the cities of Boulder, Arcata, and Oakland won against the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (and the Export-Import Bank of the United States), which were accused of financing fossil-fuel projects detrimental to a stable climate in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act in a case filed in 2002 and settled in 2009.