Peter Singer

There was another great talk at Rotman this week, by Peter Singer, CEO of Grand Challenges Canada.  

With boyish enthusiasm and rapid-fire delivery, he described the scope of the global challenges in health and how we must bring rogether science, ethics, and business to address these problems.  Grand Challenges Canada is trying to do just that, innovating on all three fronts.

'Smelly socks' is a great example of on-the-ground - literally - science.   Motivated by the observation that mosquitoes were attracted to smelly socks lying on the ground after a game of soccer, researchers wondered if isolating what made the socks attractive could help in fighting malaria.  Bed nets protect you from mosquitoes inside your home; this can be complemented by placing something outside your home that draws the mosquitoes away.  The research in Tanzania by Dr. Fedros Okumu is being funded jointly by Grand Challenges Canada and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.  

There were several main themes in Singer's talk:

The imperative for innovation:  In my MBA course, we use this defintion of innovation: fresh thinking that creates value.  A few years ago, there would be quite a debate about whether the word 'shareholder' had to precede value; lately there is no such discussion.  I believe the applicability of innovation to non-business problems is much more accepted.  Singer advocates for integrated innovation, encompassing technological, social and business innovation.

 The need for business involvement:  profitable commercialization  accelerates adoption and distribution.  A to Z Textile Mills in Tanzania is Africa's largest producer of anti-malarial bednets.  Kick-started by funding from the Acumen Fund (a social investment fund), A to Z now produces 29m bednets a year, and provides jobs for 7,000.  This kind of growth is possible because A to Z has a viable, self-supporting business.  Serum Institute in India produces half the vaccines in the world, including meningitis vaccine at 50 cents a pop.  Of course, business involvement raises huge ethical problems too.  Is it reasonable to work with Monsanto, the poster child for bad corporate citizenship, on much-maligned genetically modified crop systems when those crops could save millions from starvation? 

The importance of local involvement:   A vaginal microbicide to fight HIV in South Africa is succeeding with South African sex workers.  Other parts of the world are not seeing the same success rate.  Singer hypothesizes that this is because in South Africa the women use the microbicide just before sex, rather than once a day elsewhere.  It was the sex workers themselves who argued for this approach, because they were working with local people they were comfortable talking to about this sensitive issue. 

The benefits of mixing 'big science' and 'small science':  The Gates Foundation is a good example of an organization that first funded big top-down science and is now also funding many smaller initiatives as well. It's one thing to do the big science to develop antiretrovirals, but how do you get them to the children of HIV-positive mothers in the crucial hours right after birth?  If you can do that, you can prevent or at least vastly reduce the virus' ability to lodge in the child's body and develop into AIDS later.    How about putting in an aluminum pouch, such as we use for ketchup, and giving it to a woman any time during pregnancy with instructions to use it right after birth?  Not big science, but big impact.

The value of collaboration: - Grand Challenges Canada has worked with the Gates Foundation, the Canadian government (who channels some foreign aid money through GCC), the Norwegian government,  and the World Bank to amplify their efforts.

Singer is passionate in his search for solutions to global grand challenges.  He bubbles with a dazzling array of ideas, more than I can cover in a short post - saving lives at birth, unlocking intellectual potential through proper treatment of children, He believes is starting small, in looking at at approaches, and, most importantly, in bringing these initiatives to scale.  Not just scale on individual projects, but finding a way to bring a plethora of projects to scale, simultaneously.

TED2009 and Philanthropy

There are two themes of a TED conference. One is Ideas Worth Spreading, which is the slogan of the conference, and what appears on TED sweatshirts. What you put on the sweatshirts always is the ultimate definition of what you are about. The other theme is making the world a better place. There were several talks at Ted University and on the main stage this year about philanthropy. As one might expect from TED, they combined creativity with a wish to help others.

Blake Mycoskie is 'Chief ShoeGiver' of TOMS shoes, a company that gives a pair of shoes to a child in need every time you buy a pair of shoes. You can see this at the Toms Shoes site.

Then there was John Breen of Free Rice who invited us to play games on freerice.com site, and donate 10 grains of free to the UN World Food Program for every answer you get right. There are games about words, math, geography, art, foreign languages; if you like trivial pursuit you could get quite hooked. And 10 grains of rice are donated every time you get a correct answer, courtesy of sponsors on the site.

Martin Fisher offered some guidelines on how to choose among charities proposing to address global challenges. Make sure they're:

• Measurable
• Cost-effective
• Sustainable
• Replicable/scalable

He discusses these ideas further at the Real Good, Not Feel Good site.

Austin Hill described the online social reality game Akoha where you earn points by playing real-world missions with your friends. Based on a Play It Forward idea, you can earn points by giving someone a gift (chocolate, your favourite book), or by simply making contact. Completing Akoha missions can result in real-world partnerships - for instance a school project in Nepal.

Hill attended his first TED just weeks after his brother's funeral. The inspiration of TED's positive spirit decided him to do a site like this rather than starting another disease foundation.

Jacqueline Novogratz is founder of the Acumen Foundation and Chris Anderson's wife as of last summer. The Acumen Foundation is a non-profit global venture fund that uses entrepreneurial approaches to solve the problems of global poverty. The TED Book Club has just sent us a pre-release of Novogratz' book, The Blue Sweater (a gift from Chris himself, he hastens to note, not from TED), whose stubtitle is Briding the Gap between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World.

Novogratz spoke about the dismal facts and uplifting hopes around malaria. Malaria kills a child every 30 seconds. Novogratz talked of the efforts of people like Awa Maria Coll-Seck, Executive Director of Roll Back Malaria. Roll Back Malaria was founded in 1998 with a goal of reducing malaria by half by 2010. Coll-Seck is a very impressive woman, former minister of health for Senegal.

In Ethiopia, there were 50M people at risk of malaria and 16M cases among children in 2003. After an aggressive malaria campagn, they were able to achieve a 50% reduction in deaths. They took a multi-pronged approach, training over 33K health care works, distributed 20M nets in 18 months, delivered 12M doses of medication and sprayed 1M houses. This prevented 9.6M dcases and saved 57K lives.

Novogratz feels that you need this full set of interventions to be successful against malara, backing by tremendous political will, and the provision of multiple years of funding at one time (as against the unpredictable year-to-year funding approach in much of such work).