Jeff Skoll
Shining a spotlight on social entrepreneurs and their innovations
The Skoll Foundation was created to build a sustainable world of peace and prosperity by investing in, connecting, and championing social entrepreneurs and other social innovators working to advance bold and equitable solutions to the world’s most pressing problems. The Skoll Awards for Social Innovation have helped galvanize not only individual organizations but entire sectors, such as the 2017 and 2025 awards to Last Mile Health that have shone a spotlight on the vital importance of hiring, training, and equipping community health workers in underserved areas.
Transcript
There’s all these problems that fall through the cracks, and it takes these special kind of people to address these problems that ultimately affect, hundreds of millions, if not billions of people.
There’s a vast amount of resources that could be put to use to make a difference in the big issues of the world.
Good people who would stop at nothing to solve these problems.
So we began our annual tradition of presenting awards to special organizations who had proven a concept and were ready to scale it.
In the early days of the foundation, some of our awardees were focused on community health.
They realized a lot of medicine can be administered by people who aren’t necessarily doctors, but are neighbors and friends, and have a little bit of training.
And the concept of community health workers has worked super well in Liberia and Rwanda and many countries around the world.
I was born in Liberia, and when I was 24 years old in 2005, I decided to go back after the Civil War ended to see if we could help serve the people we’d left behind.
Liberia had only 51 doctors for a country of about 4 million people at the time, and every one of those human beings deserves dignified access to real healthcare, to modern healthcare.
The tyranny of distance is what we talk about, that if you’re too far away, you’re the last to receive health services, but you’re the one that often needs it the most.
We take healthcare out of the hospital and the clinic and bring it right to the doorstep of people by training villagers from those communities, giving them the tools, the medical equipment, the coaching, and the supervision, and the payment that they need to perform and provide healthcare in those places.
While the Skoll Award was a huge milestone for Last Mile Health, it wasn’t just the capital, it was the community.
There’s a comradery, there’s a solidarity.
We have partnered with several countries to hire, train, and equip thousands of community health workers and to reach millions of people who otherwise would’ve been out of reach of life saving healthcare.
The school foundation has embraced a community health workers as more cost-effective and more outcomes-effective than traditional health systems.
Those are the kinds of programs where we’re knitting together different groups to try to solve bigger problems.
Giving is one of the most powerful things one can do in life.
And social entrepreneurs are an incredible lever for good working towards a sustainable world of peace and prosperity.
