Report from Harvard's Social Enterprise Conference

Rob Katz — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 09:15:14 -0500

Guest blogger Nicholas P. Sullivan has written widely about technology and entrepreneurship, most notably as editor-in-chief of Inc.com. He compiles the annual Wealth of Nations Index, a ranking of seventy developing countries, is publisher of Innovations: Technology/Governance/Globalization (an MIT Press journal), and is a partner in the Global Horizon Fund, a private-equity fund of local funds in emerging markets. You Can Hear Me Now, Sullivan’s book about Iqbal Quadir and the GrameenPhone revolution, was published earlier this year.

By Nicholas P. Sullivan

The 8th annual Harvard Social Enterprise Conference last Sunday (March 6) at the Harvard Business School drew a sellout crowd of 1,000 people. Cheryl Dorsey, president of Echoing Green,
and Victoria Hale, founder and ceo of the Institute for One World Health, gave morning keynotes.

Echoing Green acts as an “angel for emerging social enterprises,” and has awarded $25 million to more than 400 entrepreneurs since 1987. Dorsey noted that when she graduated from medical school, she intended to practice medicine, but saw a Boston Globe story on the high incidence of infant mortality in Boston’s black neighborhoods. It was this “ZIP code as destiny” epiphany that led her in 1992 to start The Family Van, a community-based mobile-health unit that provides basic medical services to at-risk residents in Boston’s inner city neighborhoods, and earned her an Echoing Green fellowship.

Dr. Hale is an Ashoka Fellow festooned with awards from The Economist, Skoll Foundation, and Schwab Foundation, not to mention a MacArthur Fellowship. She is founder of the America’s first non-profit pharmaceutical company, which recently received Indian government approval (FDA approval in 2005) for a low-cost drug to combat Visceral Leishmaniasis, a deadly disease of the spleen and liver that occurs primarily in the Indian state of Bihar (as well as Nepal and Bangladesh). More “geography as destiny,” for in this state alone a sand fly bite injects the deadly parasite. She showed slides of children with inflated bellies trying to fight off infection, slides of Indian women and girls with red hair due to malnutrition. Because the disease is confined to a poor and remote region, it has not been on the radar screen for big pharma, but Hale has corralled industry to develop a low cost drug.

One World Health now has a $10, 21-day cure, but still has to deal with the issue of distribution and education. Hale notes that of all the big pharma companies who have tried to develop effective drugs to combat diseases in poor countries (Glaxo Smith Kline, Merck, Pfizer, Novartis, Eli Lilly), only Merck has succeeded—with its cure for river blindness in Africa. Hale is out to change that lamentable track record, and noted that “industry doesn’t know the world’s poorest people, doesn’t know what need doing, but they want to do well and do good. We need to ask, she says, ‘What do you need to engage? What are you afraid of?’”

(This post continues past the break; click "Read More" to continue)

NextBillion.net - Development Through Enterprise - Report from Harvard's Social Enterprise Conference - Comments

Report from Harvard's Social Enterprise Conference