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strengthen agricultural cooperatives; prepare irrigation and development plans for hillside terrain; provide clean water and sanitation to ten schools and five health facilities; and encouraging the banking sector to support farm cooperatives’ access to credit and launch a program for carbon offsets benefiting agriculture and planting trees in areas that have been deforested. In Malawi, CHDI plans to provide clean water and sanitation to seventeen more hospitals and twenty schools; expand clean water and sanitation in poor villages; develop plans for new crops and a strategy for marketing them; provide more adequate nutrition to children; and build the capacity of the national health system to test for and treat malaria. In both nations we are exploring ways to improve land management and expand the use of renewable energy. In 2008, we hope to expand these efforts to other regions in Rwanda and Malawi, and begin work in a third country. We have actively solicited other partners, including ShoreBank of Chicago. Will it work? Can we develop and implement a comprehensive strategy that will lift the per capita income of an entire country and eliminate extreme poverty? I don’t know, but it’s worth a try. So far, a great many people are better off, and Tom Hunter is getting his money’s worth.

Another economic initiative just launched in Liberia has the potential to become a model that can be implemented in other countries. The Liberia Enterprise Development Fund (LEDF) was organized by Bob Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment Television and majority owner of the Charlotte Bobcats professional basketball team. After fourteen years of a bloody civil war that left the small West African nation of three million in ruins, Liberians elected Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf president. A Harvard graduate, former World Bank official, onetime political prisoner and then political exile in Liberia’s dark years, Johnson-Sirleaf, a grandmother of six, is called the “Iron Lady” by her supporters. In 2005, after serving as head of Liberia’s Governance Reform Commission, she won a hotly contested election against a former soccer star backed by supporters of the previous regime.

After she spoke at the Clinton Global Initiative in 2006 about Liberia’s troubles and dreams, Bob Johnson decided he wanted to help. He thought that since Liberia had been founded by freed American slaves, African-American businesspeople should help to spur its revival. Johnson committed to capitalize the Liberia Enterprise Development Fund at $30 million; to work with the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation and the U.S.-African Development Foundation to maximize its impact; and to designate CHF International to manage the fund’s operation in Liberia. CHF has been promoting economic development in the United States and more than one hundred other countries since the early 1950s, with an excellent track record in community building.

The fund will focus on promoting enterprise and creating jobs through loans, equity investments, and technical assistance to local business and new entrepreneurs, and will mobilize funds for health, education, and agricultural programs. Johnson has already enlisted other prominent African-American business executives to participate, including music executive Clarence Avant, president and COO of BET Debra Lee, former transportation secretary Rodney Slater, and actors Chris Tucker, Cicely Tyson, and Jeffrey Wright.

When I went to Liberia during the summer of 2006 to kick off my foundation’s HIV/AIDS program there, President Johnson-Sirleaf asked me to meet with some university students. I spoke for a few minutes and answered their questions for about an hour. The young people I met were as intelligent, informed, articulate, and future-oriented as any college group I have ever encountered. They were looking past the years of killing, even past the economic ruin left in its wake. Anyone who met them would want to support Liberia’s rebirth.

If you want to participate, you will find the fund’s Web site at the end of the book. You’ll be doing