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Saving lives through health, hope, and trust

Scott Hillstrom at the gand opening of CFWshops in April 2000.

In 1998, Scott Hillstrom, a Minnesota lawyer and entrepreneur, was traveling through Kenya when he was struck by how difficult it was to reliably get generic drugs to people. Government clinics often ran out. Local shops often sold fakes. Even though the cost of life-saving drugs for diseases like malaria had dropped to pennies a dose, they weren't getting to the people who needed them.

 That's when Scott Hillstrom had a brainstorm. Why not start a franchise system empowering locals? Today, the HealthStore Foundation, his Minneapolis-based charity,  operates 82 CFW (Child and Family Wellness) shops in Kenya that treat more than half a million people annually.  

 The foundation finds local nurses and community health workers who put up a small amount of their own money -- $500 --  to buy into a clinic or shop as a franchisee of HSF. The foundation provides up to 88 percent of the capital and gives four weeks of intensive training in marketing and management, as well as some medical training.

When Scott Hillstrom thought about how to get medical care to Africans, he thought of McDonald's and how the franchise is able to make French fries consistently across the globe. Putting in place local franchises with rules and oversight was the answer.

The clinics themselves offer testing and diagnosis of disease in previously neglected locations. Each location is a for-profit enterprise owned by a local heath care giver, generating revenue to pay its owners a competitive annual salary. And they solve a vexing problem in Africa, where nearly half the drugs are counterfeit of substandard. HealthStore hires a field officer for every 20 clinics to ensure only drugs from approved suppliers are on the shelves.

 Hillstrom says he was at a clinic in one of Kenya’s worst slums when he asked a woman why she came to a CFW shop instead of another place. Because, she told him, when she brought her children to CFW she knew they would get better. When she took them to other clinics, sometimes they got better and sometimes they didn’t. That trust the shops will deliver legitimate drugs is the difference. Now, the charity wants to drastically scale up its operations in Kenya and Rwanda, where it has struck a public-private partnership with the government.

"A franchise system to be developed right is a long an arduous process. We have been at it ten years and we are now at the same size the Subway franchise was after ten years with 85 clinics," Hillstrom says. "Our goal is to be the size Subway is today, which is 30,000 clinics."