Mikkel Vestgaard Frandsen
The Skype connection to Kenya crackles. Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen, the 38-year-old CEO of a Swiss company that bears his family name, tried to make himself heard. His excitement is palpable.
“Watching this unfold is crazy,” he tells me. “There are so many things we’re trying out here, things we’ve never done before, things that no one has ever done before.”
Vestargaard Frandsen is a Swiss for-profit company that’s in business to save lives in the global south. Its products include LifeStraw, a water filter and PermaNet, a long-lasting bednet to protect people from malaria.
Ordinarily, it sells these products to aid organizations and governments. Then they’re given to people in need. This time, Vestergaard is trying something different: It’s directly giving away about 1 million LifeStraws, at a cost of nearly $30 million, mobilizing thousands of local people to do so, tracking results carefully and expecting to be paid back in the form of carbon credits. Mikkel’s right–this has never been done before.
How this came to pass is interesting. Founded in 1957, family-owned Vestergaard Frandsen originally produced material for work clothes. About 20 years ago, it started a line of relief products like blankets and tents. By 1997, when Mikkel became CEO, the company had phased out conventional textiles to concentrate on relief aid products.
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Imagine that you live in a poor country, without money for a pair of glasses or access to an optometrist, and you’re not seeing as well as you once did.
This product, a pair of self-adjusting eyeglasses, could change your life.
Or imagine that you are one of the 1.1 billion people on earth without access to clean, safe drinking water. Your child is in danger of contracting water-borne diseases, which kills 1.8 million a year. What would you give for this portable, water-filtration device, called LifeStraw?
Maybe you are one of the 1.6 billion people without regular access to electricity. Your children study at night using a kerosene lantern, but the fuel is expensive and dirty. A solar-powered lantern would be a dramatic improvement.
These breakthrough products, all of them invented in the last 5 o 10 years, are examples of what can be done when technology is designed for the poor. You’ve probably heard about One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), the low-cost connected computer developed by Nicholas Negroponte and the MIT Media Lab, but it’s just one of dozens of high-tech, high-impact products aimed at helping to spur global economic development. The trouble is, even though many of the products are low-cost–the LifeStraw, for example, sells for about $6.50–they aren’t available to many who need them.
That’s where a nonprofit called Kopernik comes in. Kopernik connects innovative technologies, poor communities and people who want to help. [click to continue…]
