Center for Social Innovation

In 1996, Andrea and Barry Coleman launched Riders for Health, a nonprofit in the United Kingdom dedicated to the improvement of transportation systems for health workers in Africa. The nonprofit’s main program, Transportation Resource Management, provided maintenance for motorcycles and other vehicles used by health workers to deliver medical care in remote African communities. Although dedicated to an unglamorous area of health care, the program was incredibly successful and one of the few examples of a practical solution to the world’s most intractable health care problems.

Nevertheless, by 2007, the organization was at a critical decision point. It had almost tapped out its established, external funding sources but still required significant capital to expand. The organization had to decide what strategies, both financial and operational, to implement in order to achieve the much larger scale it needed to spread the program across wider sections of Africa’s afflicted population.