Kevin Starr

Kevin Starr directs the Mulago Foundation and is the founder and director of the Rainer Arnhold Fellows Program. Mulago spends its money to drive forward the most promising ideas in health, development, and conservation in poor countries. The foundation is unabashedly obsessed with impact: designing for it, measuring it, investing in it, and taking it to scale. The Rainer Arnhold Fellows program is an outgrowth of the foundation, and works with the best emerging social entrepreneurs with solutions for the less-than-$2-a-day world. The program uses a clear understanding of impact and behavior change as the raw material to drive a systematic process of design for maximum scalability (see www.rainerfellows.org). Starr’s stint in Cambodian refugee camps at age 19 propelled him on the path to his current work. He had a perfectly good career in medicine and international health when he stumbled into philanthropy in the early 1990s. Since then he’s gotten deep into dozens of projects ranging from forest conservation by monks in Tibet to micro-franchise clinics in Kenya to one-acre farming in Burma.