Today the South African Mail & Guardian featured an article on the launch of Soweto TV, a community television station that is designed to train and empower locals to produce news that reflects their reality. Much like, TV Rocinha that was featured at WRI's Base of the Economic Pyramid Conference in Brazil, Soweto TV reaches a largely low income market; while Soweto includes over 40% of the population in Greater Johannesburg, it accounts for only 4% of the city's GDP, source: Johannesburg's Official Website.

Driven by community derived content, special programming will focus on community health issues in the township, particularly HIV / AIDS, as a build up to World AIDS Day on December 1.

WRI's latest What Works case study, HealthStore's Franchise Approach to Healthcare - Harnessing the profit motive to deliver public health in Kenya, is now available at the NextBillion.net Resources page. The 43-page case study, written by Columbia University MBA students, outlines how a hybrid public-private franchise model is serving over 400,000 patients per year for less than 1 dollar per treatment.

Public health achievements aside, HealthStore's for-profit franchises are turning a profit for their owners - enough to be called a living wage. To quote the case study, "The HealthStore model demonstrates that primary healthcare delivery is not the sole domain of the public sector. Its hybrid public-private micro-franchise model holds great potential for scaling up both within Kenya and throughout the developing world. The case shows that delivery systems are often the limiting factor in low-income and rural communities, and that the market for private healthcare services is both lucrative and socially transformative. By creating good jobs for trained healthcare personnel, HealthStore is doing its part to reverse the troubling "brain drain" affecting much of Africa. Fundamentally, HealthStore clinics are positioned at the forefront of the fight against childhood disease and death. The fact that HS clinics incorporate an innovative, for-profit franchise model speaks to the model’s potential to greatly reduce the number of children who die from preventable diseases each year."

Download the case study directly (PDF - Adobe Acrobat reader required)