Want to Fight AIDS? Buy a Cell Phone.

A provocative social enterprise article from the NYTIMES:

A new line of products from companies like Gap, Armani Exchange and Motorola aims to raise money to help fight AIDS in Africa.

Those companies, along with Converse and American Express, created the new products, which bear the brand name Red and are to begin appearing in stores this month. The companies are committed to selling the products for at least five years, and plan to donate part of their profits to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

If the Red products sell the way the companies’ other products do, the fund stands to gain hundreds of millions of dollars annually — enough to provide AIDS medications to hundreds of thousands of Africans each year.

The campaign was created by the musician Bono and Bobby Shriver, a California politician and member of the Kennedy family. Both are leading advocates for the Global Fund. The fund, which will collect and distribute money from Red in Africa, says the hundreds of millions of dollars each year given by world governments is not enough to provide medications to all of the people who need them.

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