Philanthrocapitalism_ How Giving Can Save the World - Matthew Bishop [3]
Last year, in the Bahamas, the first country to participate in our effort, I had a reunion with two five-year-old twin girls and a spunky eighteen-year-old boy who were desperately ill when I first met them but are healthy now because of the low-cost medicine purchased through our project. Three years ago I learned of a Haitian girl who was so weak with AIDS she had to be carried to her desk at school; she was among the first to receive medicine when we went to work there. I have a recent picture of her standing tall and radiant in a formal dress. I have seen infants in Zanzibar, played with children from Yunnan Province in China, and held orphans in Cambodia who are receiving lifesaving medicine though our AIDS initiative. Our program now works in twenty-five countries to diagnose, test, and care for people with HIV/AIDS, and forty-four more nations are able to buy low-cost drugs and testing materials under our contract. As of mid-2007, about 750,000 more people are receiving treatment purchased under CHAI agreements, representing about a third of all those in the developing world receiving treatment today.
Our effort is only one of the tens of thousands of public-service projects now being pursued by NGOs, individuals, and businesses throughout the world. It is no accident that in 2005, Time magazine named as its persons of the year Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono, three people who hold no political office but have done great public good as private citizens. Among its wide-ranging good works, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has spent more than a billion dollars on health care in Africa and India, hundreds of millions to develop an AIDS vaccine and a preventive microbicidal gel, and more than $1.7 billion in the United States to develop globally competitive high schools. In 2000, Bono spearheaded an international movement to forgive the debts of the poorest countries. In 2005, he generated public support for British prime minister Tony Blair’s successful effort to secure a commitment from the world’s wealthiest nations to double aid to Africa and provide more debt relief. Today Bono is leading the ONE Campaign to enlist millions of Americans to support an investment of one percent of our gross domestic product to eliminate extreme poverty in the world.
In 2002, President Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize, largely for his work after leaving the White House in fighting to eradicate guinea worm and river blindness in Africa, helping poor nations to become self-sufficient in food production, promoting human rights, building homes with Habitat for Humanity, and monitoring elections in troubled democracies to make sure that all eligible citizens can vote and that their votes are counted.
In 2006, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh for his pioneering work in founding Grameen Bank, which makes small loans to poor people, 97 percent of them women. In a nation with a per capita annual income of less than $500, the bank has made nearly seven million loans since 1983. Without requiring collateral or even a signed agreement, Grameen has an astonishing loan recovery rate of 98.3 percent, and has earned a profit in all but three years since it came into existence. In addition to enterprise loans at regular rates, which are financed out of its own deposits, the bank also runs life insurance and retirement savings programs, makes housing and education loans, and zero-interest loans to beggars, over 60 percent of which have already been paid off. When one of its borrowers dies, the branch manager attends the funeral and, before the burial, announces forgiveness of the outstanding debt. Perhaps most important, by early 2007, more than 58 percent of Grameen’s borrowers had lifted themselves above the poverty line. Their combined activities made a significant contribution to the 6.7 percent growth Bangladesh achieved last year