Skoll Entrepreneur(s): Dr. Mitch Besser and Gene Falk
Change(s) Addressed: Health

(Click here to print)

DESCRIPTION:

Long-time friends Mitch and Gene followed different paths: Mitch becoming a doctor in the developing world and Gene became a successful business man. In 2000, Mitch moved to South Africa where he saw women come in for their first prenatal visit, test positive for HIV and flee the clinic, never to return. Those who did stay received little education about their disease. Worst of all, Mitch was horrified to discover that 30 to 40% of these women gave birth to HIV-positive babies. Working without pay, Mitch launched m2m to provide the support services common in the U.S. but absent in Africa. Meanwhile, his old friend Gene, now a media industry senior executive, had been involved in HIV/AIDS issues for nearly 20 years. Based on his very personal experience as a gay man living through the worst of the epidemic in the U.S., Gene was struck by the parallels he saw in South Africa to the early days of HIV/AIDS in the U.S., when the epidemic was ignored because its most visible targets were marginalized groups. He also saw Mitch running m2m on a shoestring and realized that his (Gene’s) business skills were needed to take m2m to scale. Gene moved to Cape Town and, together, they have grown m2m to over 155 sites in two countries.

KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS AS OF 2010

• With 600 program sites, we now have over 200,000 patient encounters each month and are reaching more than 20% of the HIV+ pregnant women in the world.
• We are now employing over 1,600 women living with HIV as professionalized caregivers.
• We have implemented a monitoring and evaluation system that allows us to measure program outcomes.