Very low-income peo­ple are too often invis­i­ble to busi­nesses and soci­ety. Busi­nesses see no sig­nif­i­cant mar­ket oppor­tu­nity and gov­ern­ments view low-income areas as hav­ing insuf­fi­cient tax rev­enues to pay for basic ser­vices like clean water, health­care, hous­ing and energy. Build­ing new mod­els that pro­vide these crit­i­cal ser­vices at afford­able price – in the face of high costs, poor dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tems, dis­persed cus­tomers, lim­ited financ­ing options and, at times, cor­rup­tion – requires imag­i­na­tive busi­ness solu­tions and part­ner­ships sup­ported by investors will­ing to take on a risk/return pro­file that is unac­cept­able to tra­di­tional financiers.

Dis­ease Con­trol Tex­tiles Vester­gaard Frand­sen is a Europe-based inter­na­tional com­pany spe­cial­iz­ing in com­plex emer­gency response and dis­ease con­trol prod­ucts. It is guided by a unique Human­i­tar­ian Entre­pre­neur­ship busi­ness model, whose “profit for a pur­pose” approach has turned human­i­tar­ian respon­si­bil­ity into its core business.