Can Corporations Save The World?
Carlye Adler 11.28.06, 12:00 PM ET In areas of Sri Lanka devastated by the tsunami of 2004, hundreds of children attend new schools and thousands are served by a mobile medical clinic courtesy of Hasbro ( HAS – news – people ), the Pawtucket, R.I., toymaker. In China’s Pearl River Delta, 300,000 women migrant workers have been trained in labor rights, legal services and life skills, thanks to San Francisco-based Levi Strauss & Co. And in Africa, Asia and other tropical regions, new cases of lymphatic filariasis, also known as elephantiasis–an incurable disease that puts 1 billion people at risk of disabling deformities–may be eliminated by 2020, in great part because of a billion-dollar donation by London-based pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline ( GSK – news – people ). All across the globe, corporations are making their mark, not only with visible stakes (such as a new Golden Arches, which goes up somewhere in the world roughly every day), but also through more unlikely investment
