Yesterday,
I had to prepare a three-minute presentation about
my organization for the WEF session "Come
Meet the Social Entreprenuers." The 40 of
us were urged to share our practical strategies,
their impact and the challenges that we overcame.
Since not all 3,000 Forum participants would have
fit into our meeting room--even if they wanted
to--I will tell them my story now.
In
1989, I created a foundation in memory of my son with
two thirds of my family fortune and used half the endowment
to establish an international NGO, the Association
Francois-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) in his name. Inspired
by Dr. Jonathan Mann, then at WHO, I traveled the globe
to see how I could care for AIDS orphans and all vulnerable
children (those with HIV/AIDS, on the streets, the
sexually abused) With creative local people, I formulated
cutting-edge activities for these children in homes,
with families, replicating the solutions in other countries.
To provide them with medical care, the US FXB International
Pediatric HIV Training Program was created and is run
by the best doctors and nurses.
Doing all this
by myself with one or two staff members,
I was spinning out of control. I went
to the 1992 AIDS Conference in Amsterdam where
Dr. Mann, through the Global AIDS Policy Coalition
that I set up at Harvard for him and his work,
released the first true picture of the AIDS
pandemic. "AIDS in the World I".
Then I was off to Thailand to deal with a problem
with former sex workers whom I was helping.
Then, I flew to Myanmar where it was rumored
that sex workers that I had freed from brothels
were being killed if they had HIV/AIDS. Then
to Colombia, where I walked in its sewers to
see what children endured.
There, I broke my foot and collasped emotionally
. I had encountered so much poverty around
the world and had so little money to deal with
what was needed. And even if I had all the
money in the world, there were political, social
and economic problems that demanded much more
attention. There, in Bogota, I cried and desparately
talked to a dear friend about a solution. Harvard
would be the vehicle to deal with those problems,
and Dr. Mann would be the leader. I took a
chunk of the endowment and, with the Dean of
the Harvard School for Public Health, I established
the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights
there with Dr. Mann as its director.
And it worked.
The Center has become the leading advocate
and global lobbyist showing the inextricable
link between health and human rights. Applying
that to AIDS, Dr. Mann wrote: "In each
society, those people who before HIV/AIDS arrived
were marginalized, stigmatized, and discriminated
against become those at highest risk of HIV
infection." So that is the message that
I continue to bring wherever I go and to implement
in our grass roots field projects--whether
establishing micro enterprises in Bolivia with
its forgotten people in the 4,000-meter high
altiplano or in India where FXB India, already
present in 17 states, will expand its AIDS
prevention, testing, treatment and education
programs to all states so that AIDS will not
do to India what it has done to Africa. There
would be much more to tell, but, in a nutshell,
that's my story in three minutes.
Now I had the chance to tell my story. I urgently
ask Forum participants to talk to the other
39 'social entrepreneurs' who have similar
stories to tell. You will learn much.
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