What happens when a married couple receive their PhD’s in marketing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln? In the case of Alka and Suresh Subramanian something quite unexpected occured. Although their early careers were fairly typical -- Alka became a tenured professor at the University of South Dakota and her husband Suresh was Vice-President of Marketing for Gateway computers -- something happened in 2000 that changed both of their lives forever. Something happened that would ultimately become the Power of Love Foundation.

“We came across this brochure that talked about the AIDS epidemic in Africa. It literally stopped us in our tracks,” said Suresh Subramanian.

“We felt that we could not rest until we did something about this situation,” said Alka Subramanian.

The two quickly left their old jobs and lives behind. They began to study first-hand what could be done to provide assistance in a situation that seemed beyond hope. They visited Kenya and Zambia and were shocked at how many children were orphaned by a single disease.

“We did a little more research,” said Suresh. “The more we read it became clear to us that we could take some of our learning from the University of Nebraska and apply it here.”

One of the first things the Subramanian’s learned was that despite the best efforts of others attempting to assist with the AIDS epidemic there was still one missing ingredient that wasn’t being addressed.

“In the response that the world was delivering to the AIDS epidemic there really didn’t seem to be a great deal of focus on the overall business strategy or business model of how this was going to be implemented in a cost effective manner,” said Suresh. “There were probably a hundred different organizations building a hundred different models but nothing was being done in a manner that we learned at Nebraska as having a business strategy or scalability. We saw that we could build a model that was scalable and start to present it where others could learn from and take it to multiple locations.”

The research to build a successful model did not happen overnight. The Subramanian’s did extensive research for over a year with teams on the ground in Africa.

“We looked at the cost model and the analysis of the cost structure of how to deliver that,” said Suresh. “Then we built our model and our overall strategy that would eke out the most return for the dollar invested. This was not our dollars. We were going out and getting dollars from other people and we wanted to make sure that every dollar that you gave us was actually generating the most in return.

“We took a very strong return on investment approach and managed a cost model that we tracked every month over the past eight years. We worked down to under 70 cents per child per day. We started at over $1.40 per child per day and we’re now at less than half the cost per child and we’re delivering a broader range of services than we were delivering when we started the program.”

Beyond the core efforts of providing medical services The Power of Love Foundation also assists with teaching individuals the importance of small business and entrepreneurship.

“We have a strong belief, again coming out of UNL,” said Suresh, “that entrepreneurship and small business has a major role to play in building a local economy. When you look at a village, a collection of villages, a small town, or a county -- small business entrepreneurship has a huge role to play.”

“We provide food, medical and a package of life saving services for all children in our program,” said Alka. “We provide psycho-social counseling, we provide them training in taking their medications, and the older children we teach HIV prevention. Our children are doing well. We have lost only ten children over the past seven years. If you look at statistics in terms of life expectancy of a child born HIV positive in Zambia in only five years we could have lost many times what we have.”

A final piece of the puzzle has been creating a lending program that has been used to create self sufficiency that previously didn’t exist in many areas of Africa.

“We started doing what is now known as microlending with mothers and grandmothers who had never in their lives done any kind of business,” said Suresh. “In the last seven years we have helped over 500 families establish strong self sustaining businesses that put food on the table. Half of our loan recipients have taken more than one loan from us. They take out a loan, return it, and then take out a bigger loan and return it. It’s not enough to give people a dollar loan and walk away. We helped them with market research. We helped them formulate business strategies. We trained them on how to manage their money.”

The microlending program has a 95+% repayment rate for the grandmothers who start their own small businesses.

The Power of Love Foundation continues to fight HIV/AIDS and malaria in sub-Saharan Africa and programs in India as well. The malaria program involves the provision of treated mosquito nets. The HIV/AIDS work has created a hospice program in Zambia for children with the disease.

Though the situation is still dire, the Subramanian’s ability to instill a new sense of business awareness along with the compassionate desire to help those in need, has begun to make the impossible seem possible -- one business model at a time.

Power of Love Foundation