The G8 ministers are attending next month’s summit are invited to bag the lavish banquet they’ll be served one night at Gleneagles, Scotland and have a single bowl of rice on Devonshire Green with some nice people from MakePovertyHistory.org. More information:
This is the first post in a new category, MakePovertyHistory. I’m pledging to post links to stories, at least once a week, that illustrate the need for an organization whose purpose is the eradication of poverty and the reduction of suffering from disease, world debt, and corruption in Africa and the world over. Rather than harangue all 2 of my readers, I’ll just post the links and a short quote and let you decide for yourselves if you are moved to respond in some way of your own.
Sometimes the stories will be outrageous or horrific, and sometimes they’ll be inspiring, like this one about a man I consider to be a hero in the struggle to beat AIDS in Africa. It seems like it’s tailor-made for some help from the good people at MakePovertyHistory, too.
In Kenya, where he spent his teenage years, he watched as government mismanagement and corruption sometimes left his parents, both university professors, without paychecks for a month or more. Neighbors lived in abject poverty, and crime was a constant worry. When Darkoh was 19, a friend his age died at a local hospital because doctors were worried the young man might have AIDS and refused to treat him.
“That was the environment I grew up in–seeing a lot of poverty, poor services, even my parents struggling to make a living,” remembers the strapping young doctor. “I decided I wanted to really do something about these things.”
Today, at just 35, Darkoh is on his way to reshaping the way Africa solves its health problems. Armed with two medical degrees from Harvard University and an MBA from Oxford, he has already launched Africa’s most successful public HIV treatment program, in Botswana, has laid the groundwork for mass-scale private treatment of AIDS patients in South Africa and helped create a revolutionary health-care model that might one day extend effective medical treatment–and solutions to many other African crises–throughout the continent.
“For so long Africa has been locked into inappropriate models. Now it needs to step back, have a new kind of thought process and not just keep on optimizing things that are not working,” said Darkoh, who is trying to combine business practicality and public health idealism to create new delivery systems that work in Africa.
Colleagues think he might pull it off.