We are really excited about a partnership we did on neglected diseases, particularly deworming. A lot of kids in the developing world don't show up at school every day. We thought it was because the parents wanted them to work in the fields or because the adolescent girls were menstruating—any number of reasons why. We found out that a lot of the kids aren't going to school because they just feel lousy. They don't have access to clean water and they're getting intestinal worms.
An academic did a study about 10 to 15 years ago and said that if you give them one small pill, a deworming pill, once a year or twice a year, it actually.... In a randomized control trial—much like drug discoveries—they found that school absenteeism dropped by 25%. But most importantly, that study was neglected for a long enough period of time—meaning nobody scaled it up—that they then could go back and track those kids. They said, “Well, they showed up to school, but did it really matter?” It turns out that they stayed in school longer and that as adults they are making substantially more money—20% more.
So we did a public-private partnership, which we are enormously excited about, with a hedge fund out of the U.K. They set up this hedge fund, the Children's Investment Fund Foundation, and said, “We'll return money to our investors, but our money will go into a foundation to help kids”.
They've been wildly successful, so they have $2 billion in this foundation, and they are now paying for the distribution in all of Kenya. So we're covering all of Kenya. The pharmaceutical companies are donating the pills. With our partnership with a foundation in Texas, we are starting the process of expanding that to three or four countries. We like the fact that it's evidence-based. We like the fact that there are unconventional partners—you wouldn't think of hedge funds as being conventional partners for neglected disease—and we're scaling it across an entire country and ultimately the continent.