Philanthrocapitalism_ How Giving Can Save the World - Matthew Bishop [26]
John Wood made that decision after a trek to Nepal in 1998. A highly successful, overworked Microsoft executive, Wood went to Nepal to get away from the hectic pace of his old life. Instead, he found the driving passion of the rest of his life. On the first day of his twenty-one-day odyssey, Wood met a Nepalese education official who told him the children were eager to learn but had no books. He then took Wood to see a school with students who began learning English in first grade but whose library had so few books they were locked in a cabinet to keep them from being damaged. The headmaster told him, “Perhaps, sir, you will come back someday with books.”
Wood came home, quit his job, and founded Room to Read, with the goal of providing education access to ten million children in the developing world. In 2000, he began working with rural communities to build schools and establish libraries with English and local language books, and posters, games, furniture, and flooring. In just six years, Room to Read has built 287 schools, established more than 3,600 libraries, donated almost 1.5 million English books, and published about that many local language books in 144 different titles. It has also set up 117 computer and language labs and funded more than 2,300 scholarships for girls in places where they otherwise would not go to school. Room to Read has expanded into several other Asian nations, begun work in South Africa in 2006, and plans to move into Latin America and more African nations by 2010.
John Wood has told his own story in Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, “an entrepreneur’s odyssey to educate the world’s children.” Just think what would happen if a couple of hundred people followed his example and that of Sheri Saltzberg and Mark Grashow, or if a few thousand simply spent their next vacation working to put all the world’s children in schools, with books and other learning materials. They could do it.
Another unique global giver is World Bicycle Relief. After the tsunami, World Bicycle Relief raised $1.5 million, in cooperation with the large Christian NGO World Vision International, to provide more than 24,000 bicycles to people in Sri Lanka. The bikes fill a wide variety of needs. A student still living in a transitional shelter who wants to be a teacher no longer has to take two bus rides each to and from school, and so has more time to study. A carpenter uses his bike to save time and money going to and from work. A fish seller and a fishnet maker use their bikes to take their kids to school and increase their business. A midwife’s bicycle enables her to make twice as many home visits a day. The bicycles help to combat poverty in Sri Lanka another way too—they’re manufactured locally, according to specific quality standards. World Bicycle Relief is now working on its next big project—providing 26,000 bicycles in six African countries, beginning with pilot programs for health-care workers and for people who want the bikes in order to pursue business opportunities. Again, there will be maximum use of local manufacturing, assembly, and supply chains.
In 2004, Procter & Gamble made a commitment to provide affordable safe drinking water to poor communities in developing countries, in which six thousand children die from contaminated water every day. Procter & Gamble has developed a valuable product, PUR Purifier of Water, which comes in a small packet sufficient to purify ten liters of water for consumption. Along with its partners Save the Children, UNICEF, the U.S. government foreign assistance program, and many others, Procter & Gamble has provided fifty million PUR packets on a not-for-profit basis, enough to purify 500 million liters of safe drinking water. The company has committed to provide packets to purify 35 million more liters to provide safe water to one million more African children in