2009 International Citizen's Awards

Minnesota entrepreneur Kojo Benjamin Taylor’s experience with his 12 ExecuTrain franchises gave him the idea for creating medical clinics in developing countries.

In 1999, Taylor sold his stake in the corporate-training franchises; three years ago, he began development of MicroClinics International, which builds small health care facilities that are owned as franchises by a nurse or physician’s assistant in rural areas of Africa. The clinics operate for profit; the nonprofit MicroClinic parent company provides the $20,000 for start-up costs, which cover a small building with consultation and recovery rooms, medical equipment, and supplies.

Taylor and his wife, Theresa—president of Ellis Taylor, Ltd., an attorney and paralegal placement firm in Minneapolis—found a huge gap in medical services provided to Africans while doing research for the project. Taylor says that most hospitals and clinics in Africa are located in big cities, while most Africans live in rural areas. For a rural African, the cost of transportation to the nearest clinic can be five times his daily earnings.

“Thirty percent of the clinics are serving 70 percent of the people, and 70 percent of the clinics are serving 30 percent of the people,” Taylor says. “There seemed to be a distribution problem.”

The Taylors established the first MicroClinic three years ago in Ghana, their home country. Theresa and Kojo met there during high school and then moved to New York in 1975 to attend college. They came to Minnesota in 1978.

Sharon Garth, vice president of supplier diversity at Wells Fargo in Minneapolis, knows the Taylors through their work together on the Midwest Minority Supplier Development Council and the International Leadership Institute. “It was so exciting to learn that they found a way to deliver affordable health care” to those who’d otherwise not get it, Garth says.

Garth says that six diseases—malaria, measles, tuberculosis, pneumonia, HIV/AIDS, and diarrhea—are responsible for the deaths of 14 million Africans each year. She points out that all of these diseases can be prevented or treated at a low cost; they often don’t require a doctor to administer tests and provide treatment. But the fact that medical facilities are so few and far between makes treatment efforts difficult.