Activity Description: In response to its domestic AIDS crisis, the Botswana government is developing comprehensive programs to cope with both the disease and the region's shortage of physicians and medical personnel. In conjunction with Harvey Friedman, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Penn Medical School and director of the Penn Program in Botswana, Botswana's Ministry of Health has authorized a center at Wharton -- the Sol C. Snider Entrepreneurial Research Center -- to help the country develop a more efficient system to manage HIV/AIDS therapy and monitor HIV patients.

One early result of that initiative has been a software monitoring program that, in the long run, could enable nurses to deliver diagnostic and prescriptive services to many more HIV patients than currently possible.

Based on four experimental entrepreneurial philanthropy programs that are already in progress, including the one in Botswana, the Snider Center hopes to attract philanthropists to fund university research that can identify potential business opportunities and set up pilot programs to carry them out. Once this happens, the Center anticipates that local entrepreneurs will join these businesses and increase what MacMillan calls the "social wealth of a society."