Subscribe
Last week, I attended a session of the NYU Reynolds Program series “Social Entrepreneurship in the 21st Century,” with speaker Paul Farmer (our own CEO, Jacqueline Novogratz, spoke in an earlier session). Farmer is a physician-anthropologist who co-founded Partners in Health, a non-profit providing health care service to poor in various parts of the world (including Haiti, Rwanda, Peru, Russia, Lesotho and Malawi). Partners in Health is also a leading public health research and advocacy organization.
Dr. Farmer coined his talk an ‘insider’s critique’ of social entrepreneurship, and started by wondering whether he was in fact a social entrepreneur. Does he, by his own definition, bring real innovation to solving big problems? What’s so innovative about what he does? Partners in Health basically says that poor people deserve basic health services and then makes it happen. Farmer thinks that access to those services should be a right enjoyed by all people. However, the fact is that most of the world’s poor don’t have access to basic health needs – even defined by mid-19th century standards: clean water, food, sanitation. (Amartya Sen might describe these deprivations as “unfreedoms.”)
According to Farmer, the efforts of most social entrepreneurs are falling short – despite the best of intentions. Their innovations are not reaching the people they are designed to help. Much hard work is being done, but it is scattershot. He asks the questions: are we innovating merely for the sake of innovating? Are we targeting the right problems? Answering himself, he argues that we must keep our innovations grounded in solving the problems of the poor.
Farmer also warns social entrepreneurs to be mindful of damaging public sector initiatives. Even more, he cautions that a social entrepreneur may contribute to the lack of public sector service delivery, because a problem may appear to be getting solved. He thinks that the problems of global poverty (as well as environmental problems) are so large and so intractable that they can only be solved by a broad-based social movement, a “bus,” as he puts it. The bus should carry both “greens” and social entrepreneurs out to beat poverty. The bus needs experts, entrepreneurs and governments. And the movement needs to resonate and build among large and growing groups of people, and in the media as well.
Dr. Farmer spoke eloquently and made a good case. Still, it was interesting to hear him argue that this battle would not be won except by a grand coalition, rather than by brilliant examples of success, i.e. little beacons of light. Many have associated his work to date as constituting one of those beacons.
No Comments so far
Leave a comment
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>