2010 Social Innovation Award Winners Named

Most Innovative Small For-Profit: Vestergaard Frandsen, a Danish company that, for 40 years, made uniforms for hotel workers and retailers. Now it makes textile-based, life-saving products, including ZeroFly, a durable plastic sheeting for sheltering refugees that also kills disease-spreading insects, and LifeStraw, a water filtration tool the size of paper-towel cylinder that helps thousands who are deprived of clean drinking water, helping them to turn polluted water into drinkable supplies. »

Work Smarter: Vestergaard Frandsen

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."»

Snapshot from Grandmothers Against Malaria Initiative (GAMI) Celebrations

Bed net donation for GAMI: South African musician Yvonne Chaka Chaka--a Roll Back Malaria and UNICEF Ambassador, Ida Odinga--wife of the Kenyan Prime Minister, Ms. Sarah Obama--wife of US President Barack Obama's grandfather, and Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen, CEO of the Vestergaard Frandsen Group, celebrate the donation of 2,000 PermaNet bed nets to Ms. Obama's charity, Grandmothers Against Malaria Initiative. The donation was made near Kogelo, Kenya where Ms. Obama lives, on Tuesday, February 2, 2010.»

A Company Prospers By Saving Poor People's LivesIt all started with mosquito nets. Or, no, with guinea worm filters. [...] 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. »

Mr. Frandsen says the fact that a disease that caused so much suffering could be prevented so easily got him thinking about other waterborne illnesses in the developing world. He rattles off the numbers: More than a billion people are without access to safe drinking water. Diarrhea kills more than 1.8 million people a year, and chronic diarrhea is the leading killer of people with AIDS. »

While visiting a clinic in western Kenya a few months ago, [Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen] saw thousands of people lining up to get "their vitamin A shot, their measles vaccination and their mosquito-repellent bed nets. As a businessman, I can be proud to get a contract for 2 million bed nets and fulfill it on time," he says. "But as a person, I can be proud that over the lifetime of the nets they will prevent the deaths of 400,000 children." »

Water Worker
"No one wants to be the rock star for diarrhea," says Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen, Danish inventor of the LifeStraw, a $4 drinking tube that removes almost all the disease-causing bacteria, viruses, and parasites in untreated water. »