World AIDS Day and Social Entrepreneurs: The Uganda Case

by Nathaniel Whittemore · 2008-12-01 13:52:00 UTC
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Not many people would recognize the name Noerine Kaleeba. Even among those deeply involved with the world of social entrepreneurship, neither she nor her peers such as Beatrice Were or Milly Katana are generally recognized alongside the John Wood's, Muhammad Yunus's, or Paul Farmer's. Yet each of them was a social entrepreneur who helped lead a movement that fundamentally changed the trajectory of AIDS in Uganda, one of the great success stories in the fight against AIDS.

In the mid 1980s, just a few years after the AIDs epidemic flared up in recently post-war Uganda, there was immense stigma around the disease. Yet with the founding of organizations like The AIDS Support Organization (TASO), National Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS, National Guidance and Empowerment Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS, Kitovu Mobile and others, a new generation of mostly women social entrepreneurs created a new model for home-based care and counseling that helped communities come together to learn about the disease and collectively reduce stigma.

At first, international agencies like the World Health Organization dismissed these efforts as random, chaotic, and lacking a coherent "theory of change." But it was precisely the openness and frankness of the community conversation, designed and led by local people experiencing the real fall out of the disease, that paved the way for serious conversations about sexual behavior change. The thesis of Helen Epstein's recent book The Invisible Cure is that while new treatments and "ABC" models were important, it was this capacity for conversation that leads to common sense behavior change that was at the core of Uganda's incredible (and unfortunately all too unique) success in combatting AIDS, with a drop in HIV prevalence from between 15-30% in the late 80s and early 90s to 5% in 2001.

Its a good example of the importance of local entrepreneurship and the importance of communication between social entrepreneurs, so that we can scale approaches, not just organizations. TASO is still at the forefront of HIV/AIDS and community health work in Uganda, but an incredible ecosystem of innovative projects tackling other elements of the pandemic work around them, as well.

It's not just Uganda where you can find passionate social entrepreneurs tackling HIV/AIDS and related global health issues. The "Condom King" has changed Thailand's approach to the epidemic. Haitian community workers trained by Partners in Health are now helping Rwanda built a treatment infrastructure. The list goes on and on.

On this World AIDS Day, lets take a minute not only to celebrate all of the social innovators out there, by to more actively build the structures of support they need to tackle this incredible challenge.

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Nathaniel Whittemore is the founder of Assetmap. Previously he was the founding director of the Northwestern University Center for Global Engagement.
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