Three Challenging Lessons Social Entrepreneurs Can Learn From World AIDS Day

If you've done a Google search this morning, or logged into Twitter, you may have noticed that everything seems to have turned red. This is in honor of World AIDS Day, an annual reminder of the disease which continues to ravage worldwide. It is a good occasion for social entrepreneurs to sit back and reflect on both the opportunities and challenges of our field, and think about the lessons the day has to teach us.

1. Lesson #1: Markets Can Deny, As Well As Create, Access. This one cuts to the core of our excitement around social enterprise. Many social entrepreneurs came to the field because of a belief in the ability to harness markets for good and use more equitable market practices to distribute vital goods and services. The challenges of access to life-saving medicine in the developing world, however, demonstrate that even when you have actors with good intentions, thinking about medicine and health treatment as a commodity rather than a right can price some people out. Paul Farmer put it best in his acceptance speech at the Skoll World Forum a few years ago: "Does anyone really believe that a mother loves her newborn more if she had to pay some sort of users fee for prenatal or obstetrics care?"

2. Lesson #2: Collective Action Matters. Another gospel of social entrepreneurship is that of scale; the notion that an innovation can be concocted, tested, and then brought around the world to achieve maximum impact. The excitement around scale is well-intentioned, and is driven by the recognition of the fundamental bigness of our problems. World AIDS Day is a reminder, however, that sometimes - perhaps in fact most times - problems can not be solved by one or even a few actors or institutions, and need high-level coalitions to address issues from every angle.

The AIDS problem is a problem of education, prevention, treatment, and related illness - and that's just from the medical side of things. It is also a problem of poverty, lack of mobility, global injustice - it is a problem of social institutions. Progress that has been made with the issue has largely been creative partnerships that take multilateral approaches to addressing some piece of it - the Ugandan government's partnership with local and international NGOs, for example, of the Clinton Foundation's work to meet the gap between what governments can pay for anti-retroviral treatment and what pharma can charge.

3. Lesson #3: Next Gen Change Leaders Need To Be Schooled In The Language Of Justice And Rights, Not Just Management. The idea of increasing organizational efficiency has been big for a while in the nonprofit sector, and along with it, many organizations have been clamoring for MBAs to fill out their staff. This is a largely positive shift in the sector, but it also stands the risk of forgetting the worlds that social sectors live in simultaneously.

Next generation social entrepreneurs cannot just be trained in the practice of nonprofit management, organizational efficiency, bottom of the pyramid market strategies and so on. I believe that all social entrepreneurs need a grounding in the language of justice and rights. Rights are sometimes complicated for markets and market based approaches to poverty because markets fundamentally distribute goods and services to places where they can be paid for, rather than where they are "deserved" in some abstract fashion. Yet at the same time, they are not in any way mutually exclusive concepts.

One of the most heartening things to take away from this World AIDS Day is that the change leaders of tomorrow have already begun to self organize to learn about social justice and social entrepreneurship all at once. Groups like GlobeMed and FACE AIDS have created national infrastructures to help aspiring change agents with an eye towards the medical field get hands on experience, academic and professional training, and build networks of peer support. They are also, more than ever before, building global partnerships with their young peers in the developing world. In the process they're laying the foundation for a more healthy and equitable 21st century, and that's something to be celebrated.