Encroaching on Charity - Hooray!

I've always believed that charity should be mostly reserved for tasks that cannot be dealt with by profit-making businesses. So, for example, I'm not sure that stamping out smallpox throughout the world would pay a direct monetary dividend to the organization that did the stamping out, so that seems like a good project for a non-profit group.

But it always excites me to hear of someone figuring out a way to tackle a beneficial but seemingly money-losing task and still make a profit, because if they make a profit, they'll keep doing it and do more of it, and other people will do it, and relatively scarce charitable money can be redirected to those areas that can't be handled by profit making organizations.

With that lengthy preamble, I really want to recommend this article, Babble Rouser, a Forbes article about Denis O'Brien, who empowers poor people with cheap cell phone technology - often in defiance of their own corrupt governments - and thereby boosts the living standard of whole countries, and in the process makes a profit!

I wouldn't have thought it could be done, but I'm delighted to be proven wrong.