The image above is taken from the Vestergaard Frandsen webpage about their product LifeStraw® . The page explains: “Half of the world’s poor suffer from waterborne disease, and nearly 6,000 people – mainly children – die each day by consuming unsafe drinking water. LifeStraw® water purifiers have been developed as a practical way of preventing disease and saving lives, as well as achieving the Millennium Development Goal of reducing by one-half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe water by the year 2015.”
I have added the mobile device in a child’s hands. At least half the world’s children suffer from ignorance. Mobiles are a practical way of preventing ignorance.
The LifeStraw® story carries a very important lesson for those who would prevent ignorance: Vestergaard Frandsen makes a profit by providing the individual water purifiers, and several other refugee products. There is money to be made by giving people what they need to transform from refugee to productive citizen. The potential for making the money and the transformations is huge.
For more on these thoughts, there is an article in the New York Times this morning about Vestergaard Frandsen:
. . . There are plenty of charitable foundations and public agencies devoted to helping the world’s poor, many with instantly recognizable names like Unicef or the Gates Foundation.
But private companies with that as their sole focus are rare. Even the best-known is not remotely a household name: Vestergaard-Frandsen. . . .
