2008 Woodie Awards
Summer Stories -Daniel E. Rosan, Malawi
MBA 09, OI
Issue date: 9/2/08 Section: News
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I am at the Partners in Health guest house in Neno, in the heart of Malawi's poor, mountainous border region, in the heart of Africa. Today, I rush through the ice-cold shower, notice the electricity is out again, and head to the hospital to spend the day with the pharmacy team delivering malaria medicines to health centers even more remote than we are.
That day ended with an emergency, a community health worker ill with cerebral malaria whom we found being carried by her family the 20km from her home to the hospital. We put her in our Land Rover and she was successfully treated. It drove home the stakes - good supply chains here are a matter of life and death.
HBS students travel the world for their summer internships, but I would argue none were farther from paved roads or supermarkets than I was in Neno. Partners in Health, an international health delivery organization which operates in nine countries, has just begun operations here in a partnership with the Clinton Foundation and the Malawian Ministry of Health. The main hospital is not yet open, but already over 1,000 patients are on life-saving antiretroviral AIDS drugs. They asked me to serve as an internal consultant focused on food and drug costs. In the process, I got to live and work with an incredible collection of American and Malawian staff who have moved far from their homes to lift this district out of poverty.
There were some missteps along the way - such as my hubristic attempt to help a friend make mud bricks for his mothers' new house (bottom line: I am bad at making bricks). But overall living in a close-knit rural community was a privilege, and it came with real insight into how development really happens.
To describe PIH as only a health care provider is to fundamentally misunderstand its development role. In Neno, the soil is poor, the roads are bad, and the vast majority of inhabitants have no running water, indoor plumbing, or electricity. PIH is therefore not just the only health care option, it is an economic driver. PIH employs 300 people, a huge number in an area where the economy is based on subsistence farming. PIH runs the largest vehicle fleet in a district where even the ubiquitous minibus is a rare sight. PIH buys hundreds of thousands of dollars of food, feeds staff and patients alike, and is building housing, warehouses, clinics, hospitals, even septic systems.
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nick wright
posted 9/03/08 @ 3:00 PM EST
Good for you, Dan. It is so easy to do good and be popular in Malawi when you have plenty of money and 4WDs. But it looks as if you are thinking beyond that to the sustainability of your enterprise and to local involvement. (Continued…)
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