Global Health Progress

By Ellis Rubinstein, Founder & Council Chair of Scientists Without Borders and President & CEO of The New York Academy of Sciences.

How proud we are when we manage to donate anti-retroviral pills to thousands of Africans suffering the ravages of HIV AIDS. But if the water they use to take the pills is killing them, do we have a hydrologist in-house to solve the problem?

And when we proudly subsidize free insecticide-treated bed nets for an entire district, do we achieve our dreams if the children who would have died of malaria live long enough to starve because their parents haven’t the resources to purchase improved seeds and fertilizers? And yet what do we know about delivering the wonders of modern agriculture?

This column is about the power of working together. And it is about an opportunity for all of us who care to do so. It is about Scientists Without BordersSM, an unprecedented focal point for all of the individuals and organizations that are already giving so much to achieve greater impact merely by coming together.

It was in the Sauri village in western Kenya that I first realized how much more we could achieve if we only joined forces. The United Nations Millennium Project had commenced a grand experiment one year earlier. Jeff Sachs and his team had set out to prove a simple notion: that it would cost astonishingly little – $60 per villager per year – to provide integrated help such that following a 5 year period, the poorest of the poor would be prepared to climb out of poverty on their own.

I didn’t believe the concept until I saw with my own eyes what a village of 5,000 people could do with improved seeds, fertilizer, clean water, bed nets, anti-retrovirals, deworming pills, a clinic, community health workers, a single truck for emergency births, and three mobile phones strategically placed.

For starters, the food crop had come in at 3.6 times the previous year’s harvest. There was so much grain, the villagers could provide free lunches for every child who would go to school. So every kid did go to school…for the first time in years. And the scores on the national test rose from well over 100th on average in the district to 4th, all in that single year and with no further interventions. Except, of course, that the children were not only eating, they were largely free of malaria because they were sleeping under long-lasting insecticide-treated bed nets. And most of the children weren’t suffering from helminth-borne diseases any more. And they were drinking clean water for the first time in their lives, drawn from the community’s first safe wells.

This story, which is now playing out in over a dozen villages in 10 countries, gets better yet. More than 100 village women in Sauri had created committees to organize agriculture, environment (new methods of cooking that required far less wood), water management, education, and even business. They were planning how they would invest their first cash from sales of their bumper harvest. And the government ministers who saw with their own eyes how much could be done for how little – if assistance was integrated – were considering not merely bringing electricity to the district as the villagers demanded but implementing similar miracles in other districts whose citizens had heard about the Sauri success and were beginning to clamor for the tiny infusion of support that would transform their villages as well.

There is hope, I decided in that Sauri village, that the daunting challenges of the Millennium Goals could be achieved. But they will be achieved only by taking the vision of people like Jeff Sachs and Bill Gates to scale. And what pan-government organization will lead the charge? What institution will recognize that only by integrating the assistance across all sectors will the full value of the efforts of so many be achieved?

Enter the incredible promise of community building through the Internet. If an unprecedented online community could create an online encyclopedia, if businesses could benefit from innovations appearing as if by magic on Web sites created to reward innovation, could the burgeoning community of individuals and organizations striving to assist the poorest of the poor not come together in an informal public/private partnership to achieve synergies in what we do?

On May 12, The New York Academy of Sciences launched Scientists Without Borders. It begins as a Web portal that is not “owned” by The New York Academy of Sciences but, rather, is an alliance of NGOs, companies, universities, government agencies and even experts willing to volunteer their time (http://scientistswithoutborders.nyas.org). Visitors register as individual, as leaders of projects in the field or as representatives of their organizations. What they do in a 15-minute process is provide basic contact information, describe their activities (or desired activities), and provide an overview of what they have to offer and/or what they need. Through a Google Maps application, any of us can “fly in” to a country in the Developing World and see who is working there and discover what they need or can offer. (For organizations and individuals in Developing Countries who are hampered by poor connections, there is a low-bandwith application.) Or we can directly query the underlying database to see who can test our samples, train our health workers, and provide advice on dealing with local bureaucrats or complementary assistance to the people we are serving.

Two months after launch, 140 organizations have joined, nearly 100 leaders of projects on the ground in developing countries have registered, and nearly 500 individuals have offered their expertise. All have concluded that what they do so well might be even more effective if it was leveraged by complementary activities by others. Bringing together the hydrologists to help the immunologists; the agriculture specialists who can be guided by climatologists; the infectious diseases experts whose work could be vastly scaled up through diagnostics delivered via cell phones…and so on. This is the core concept underlying Scientists Without Borders. And sometimes, as I overheard Ray Gilmartin say to another pharmaceutical company CEO in Davos, it would be great just to know that a peer company has solved the bureaucratic hurdles being encountered in a new country or new location.

We at Scientists Without Borders are proud to have garnered in only the first weeks of life the interest not merely of the scientific community but also of Engineers Without Borders, of microfinance experts, of ICT leaders, and more. We hope you and your company will join us. You are making an enormous difference on your own. But you could be having even greater impact by joining us in our unprecedented “Match.Com” for the achievement of the United Nations Millennium Goals – arguably the challenge of our lifetimes.