Philip Harrison at the University of Botswana, talking to pharmacy students and handing out donated books.Supplied
The organizer: Philip Harrison
The pitch: Creating the Square Foundation
The cause: To support pharmacists in Africa
Philip Harrison arrived in Montreal from Britain in 1976, planning to stay for a couple of years and then see more of the world.
Mr. Harrison never left. He married, raised a son with his wife and pursued a successful career in pharmacy as a consultant and entrepreneur. After he retired in 2014, Mr. Harrison began looking for a way to put his expertise to use helping others. He had long been aware of the paucity of health care services across Africa and so he launched the Square Foundation, a charity that supports a range of educational programs for pharmacists in Namibia, Ethiopia, Malawi and Botswana.
Mr. Harrison, 78, noted that while there are roughly 60,000 pharmacists in Britain, there are just 300 in Malawi, which has 18 million people. “And the pharmacist is often the first health care professionals that the patient sees,” he said.
The foundation has funded scholarships for a dozen pharmacy students and supplied books, laptops and tablets to schools. It also runs an e-learning program for pharmacy colleges and professional societies so that pharmacists can keep up with the latest practices.
Mr. Harrison started the foundation as a U.K.-registered charity in the hope that alumni from the University of London, where he studied, would contribute. While that has happened to some extent, Mr. Harrison has funded the charity largely on his own. He and the board of directors are now looking for new sources of funding and planning to hand over more of the charity’s operations to its African partners.
Mr. Harrison travels to Africa a couple of times a year and he regularly receives updates from students Square has helped. One student recently mentioned how much the charity’s support had meant to him and his family. “So when you get letters like that, it makes it all worthwhile,” he said.