Philanthrocapitalism_ How Giving Can Save the World - Matthew Bishop [9]
A few years ago, when Oprah announced that her show would focus on positive stories instead of the negative and superficial judgmentalism that dominates so much of TV, radio, and print media, a lot of people thought her ratings would dip. She made a bet that the American people want something better. So far, she’s winning.
PEOPLE WHO WANT more hands-on involvement with their giving have options that fall between the comprehensive involvement of the Gates Foundation and the no-strings giving of Buffett, Robin Hood, and Angel Network donors. Every person who sets up a family foundation and makes decisions about what projects to fund does this to some extent. Universities, fine-arts organizations, and major health groups like the American Heart Association receive much of their funding from such sources.
But for people who want to make a measurable difference in a specific area, the foundation as NGO offers limitless possibilities. I have had personal experience with several outstanding examples of this kind of effort. Here are four of them.
In 2004, Chris Hohn set up a unique hedge fund in London. He called it the Children’s Investment Fund and specified that a portion of the fees generated by the fund would be put into its charitable branch, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation. With very high returns on investment, the fund has already put well over a billion dollars into its foundation. The rapidly growing operation is run by Jamie Cooper-Hohn, Chris’s wife, who brings intelligence, intensity, and a businesslike insistence on results to the foundation’s mission: improving the lives of poor children in developing countries by supporting strategies that will have a lasting positive impact on their lives and communities. The foundation supports projects that address children with HIV/AIDS; emergency needs of children and families affected by war and natural disaster; microfinance; and sexual exploitation. To date, most of its efforts have been directed toward helping children with HIV/AIDS in African countries and India, and children at risk in Darfur.
In 2005, the Hohns forged a partnership with my foundation’s HIV/AIDS Initiative to provide antiretroviral medicines—ARVs—to children. At the time, more than 500,000 children under fifteen were dying of AIDS every year, and at most only 25,000 children were receiving pediatric medicines, most of them in Brazil and Thailand where the governments provide the ARVs, leaving about 10,000 children receiving appropriate medicine in the entire rest of the developing world. In other words, a child with AIDS in a poor country had a one in twenty chance of receiving lifesaving medicines (at the time the comparable figure of adults was about one in eight). While we had succeeded in lowering the price of adult generic ARVs to $139 per year, comparable pediatric medicine cost $600, because of the low demand. Most countries couldn’t afford to buy them, and some tried to make do by cutting the adult pills in half, which didn’t work very well. After meeting with Ira Magaziner—he’s the chairman of our HIV/AIDS Initiative, and I’ll tell you more about his activities later—Jamie and Chris committed to providing medicine for ten thousand children in China, India, and several African nations, doubling the number of children getting treatment. The money they provided from the Children’s Foundation and some of its generous friends enabled Ira to negotiate a reduction in the price to $196, setting off a surge in funding for kids and further price reductions in pediatric medicine. Meanwhile, a lot of children are going to live and have better lives because of Chris Hohn and Jamie Cooper-Hohn. And they’re barely forty years old; their best work is still to come.
When I asked Chris why he was giving on such a scale, he said, “Beyond a certain point,