Although the health challenges facing Africa are enormous, unique efforts are underway to help diminish the human toll that illnesses exact and to ease the related economic cost.
Organizations such as the World Economic Forum (WEF), the Global Business Coalition on HIV/Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GBC) and the U.S.-based Corporate Council for Africa (CCA) are involving the private sector in Africa's health care struggle.
They have partnered with nongovernmental organizations, multinational companies, smaller enterprises, international lenders and others to diminish the stigma of HIV/Aids and bridge societal gaps to help better deal with the disease.
The CCA helps to create partnerships between the private and public sector to create an environment in which businesses convene workers, educate them and link them to services. This supports public sector efforts to provide care and education for citizens and in the long run helps ease the disease burden.
Win-Win for Everybody
"In the past three or four years the private sector has become much more engaged," said Victor Barnes, director of CCA's HIV/Aids Initiative. "I think part of that is being driven by the public sector and its recognition that these kinds of partnerships are a win-win for everybody.
"Part of it is the simple fact that when you start to talk about access to treatment and the kind of infrastructure required to deliver services beyond the urban center, the private sector has a real edge in its capacity to use its supply chain and some of its other organizational capacity to help the public sector actually to deliver those goods."
Elizabeth Ashbourne, a senior operations officer at the World Bank who formerly coordinated the public-private partnership effort on HIV/Aids in Africa, said the public and private sectors used to speak "a different language" on Aids. But once they were brought together their conversation became productive.
The World Bank and the CCA support business coalitions across Africa in addressing HIV/Aids prevention, care and treatment. The composition of the coalitions varies from country to country and most of the older, stronger ones are in southern Africa. There are currently 28 coalitions across the continent and a pan-African coalition based in South Africa.
"Those bodies represent many different variations of coalitions that really are compilations of the private sector developed to speak in one voice for the private sector and to interact quite directly with national Aids commissions to try and look for ways to create active partnerships between the public and the private sector," Barnes said.
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"One impetus for doing that and for engaging the private sector in that manner is not only to speak with a cohesive and coherent voice, but also to create opportunities for pooling resources and creation of opportunities for small and medium-sized enterprises."
Franchising Health Services
Opportunity – mainly in the form of delivery of service and maintaining standards – is foremost on the mind of Scott Hillstrom when he talks about health care in Africa.
Hillstrom, a proponent of franchising health services on the continent, heads an organization which sets up medical clinics and drug shops that distribute non-prescription medication.
The HealthStore Foundation, which he founded and operates, has already opened 65 outlets, known as CFWshops, in Kenya. It aims to open 30 more and Hillstrom says they also plan to open outlets in Rwanda.
Franchising was one of the only ways of maintaining business and clinical standards, Hillstrom added. "If we're ever going to create large-scale access to health care to the poor and if it can only be done one outlet at a time it's only going to be done by franchising.
"If we had as many of these kinds of outlets going as Subway has sandwich shops, we would reach about 150 million patients per year, we think, at a cost of less than one dollar per person."
