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Reinvent your business for social good
For a week in September 2008, Vestergaard Frandsen, a manufacturer of disease-control products, moved its offices to western Kenya. Some 160 employees manned 31 clinics in Lurambi with an ambitious mission: to test and counsel 80 per cent of the local population for HIV.
Swiss accountants and American sales managers worked alongside Kenyan government trained health workers, distributing condoms and controlling the crowd. "Bearing in mind that the country had just come out of election violence and that there were thousands of people lining up for an HIV test many thought would be their death sentence, it actually went very well," recalls Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen, CEO of Vestergaard Frandsen. "There was music and a bit of festivity. One mother was tested and the following day she brought her kid and her drums just to hang with the crowd."
This wasn't a corporate social responsibility gimmick: it was proof of concept. In seven working days, Vestergaard Frandsen tested 47,000 people, 80.2 per cent of the population, by giving each person who attended a Carepack. This contained condoms and two products manufactured by the company, the Lifestraw (a water-filtration device) and the PermaNet (an anti-malaria mosquito net). The test proved that the model was scalable and in February 2010 the Kenyan civil service unveiled a $60m proposal for the business to expand the project to the whole of the Western Province's population of 4.8m.
Doing good is good money for Vestergaard Frandsen but 15 years ago such a "profit for a purpose" wasn't part of the business plan.
In 1992, the company was a small, struggling textile business, supplying uniforms for hotel receptionists and supermarket staff, "profile clothing" designed to present an upbeat attitude to the client. Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen had no interest in making shirts: his "desire for adventure" instead took him to Lagos, where he started a truck business.
A coup forced him back to Europe, where his father, then CEO, had a problem: he had 1.5 million metres of woollen fabric sitting unused in a Swedish army warehouse. His son took it off his hands, cutting it into blankets to sell in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo as it struggled to cope with an influx of refugees from Rwanda. Two years later, his unit was larger than the rest of the family business. It was a revelation: "We found out the enormous potential we had as a company, by transforming the business into a life-saving operation."
The transformation was incremental. The company became a supplier of guinea-worm filters to the Carter Centre, a not-for-profit humanitarian organisation, in 1998. Now, the disease is four years away from becoming only the second ever to be eradicated. To save money, the company packaged the nylon filters into straws. This would later inspire the concept of the LifeStraw, included in the Museum of Modern Art in New York for its design.
The final point "when things changed for good" came in 2006. The company won a $10m contract to distribute two million PermaNets to children in Niger, but Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen realised he had done more than just good business: over their lifetime, the nets will save the lives of 400,000 children. "From that moment on, we said that this company has more than just one bottom line."
Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen is certainly looking after both: the company is now approximately 20 times the size it was when he joined and is likely to grow. "Malaria costs African countries close to $12bn per year. But you can reduce and control it for as little as $3bn a year. There probably isn't any other investment out there today that offers such an opportunity."
But it's adventure, not financial success, that still drives Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen. For the past four days, no one at the company has heard from their CEO. He's been out of contact in the Kenyan countryside, launching a health centre alongside Yvonne Chaka Chaka, a South African musician, and Sarah Obama, the US President's Kenyan grandmother, to cater for the 2,000 people who tested positive for HIV in 2008. "The most inspiring thing," Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen says, explaining his absence, "is to be there where it takes place."
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
