BOP-oriented businesses have the potential to become a powerful transformative force in low-income countries, but businesses have other roles to perform that could both solve social problems and serve their self-interest.

Consider this article from The Economist, “Business and AIDS.” It describes how a civil society organization, Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS (GBC), and its local chapters have worked to convince South African businesses to join the fight against the disease. GBC advocates that businesses monitor their workers and provide them with treatment. Initially resistant, because of the time and monetary costs that worker support entails, some South African firms have begun to adopt GBC’s suggestions. This progress appears to result from GBC’s strategies that distribute free treatment kits to South African businesses, and that articulate to businesses how HIV/AIDS treatment improves their bottom line by prolonging the lifespan of infected workers.

From a public health perspective, GBC’s focus on South African businesses makes sense, because businesses have an important leverage point in fighting the HIV/AIDS epidemic: an established infrastructure that employees visit everyday. This greatly simplifies the necessary process to educate workers, to diagnose the infected, and to treat the disease. As a consequence, anti-HIV/AIDS programs that businesses sponsor more easily reach their employees as compared to some public sector programs that lack an established, institutional connection with their target population to administer assistance.

Building entire business models directly oriented to fighting poverty should not limit our thinking about the full social potential of the private sector. BOP-oriented businesses should be only one strategy in a portfolio of approaches that uses the private sector as a force to fight social problems.