Partners In Health believes helping these patients means dealing with their social problems as well as providing drug therapy. In this episode of Helping Social Entrepreneurs, Alvin Hall comes face to face with what it’s like to be poor and HIV positive in Africa. Can he help PIH come up with a business blueprint so they can reproduce their successful model across the world? In Malawi, the weekly HIV clinic is teeming with patients of all ages, from babies to grand-parents. A health care worker is questioning one of them about their social and economic background. He writes down an increasingly grim litany. Education – none, job – none, children – many, rooms in mud hut – too few. It is clear that these are people in need. In Malawi, one in eight adults are infected with HIV. But drugs alone may not be the answer to this deadly scourge. In Neno, a remote area in southern Malawi, poverty and HIV are both rampant. There are clutches of straw roofed huts, neglected villages and abandoned crops. People here are obviously very poor. It is the recipe for a major health crisis, one that is far beyond the resources of the government to cope with. But in the last few years, they have joined forces with Partners In Health (PIH), a social enterprise dedicated to providing quality health care to the world’s poorest people. PIH believes that social factors are as important as medical ones.