Real World

By David Bank, The Wall Street Journal - April 22, 2004

Rob Glaser approaches competition with Microsoft Corp. and Apple Computer Inc. as a life-or-death struggle for his company, RealNetworks Inc. But at Central Hospital in Kigali, Rwanda, in February, he saw real life-or-death struggle. Patients, mostly women, were crowded two and three to a bed, almost all dying of AIDS.

On the same trip, Mr. Glaser invited Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, to visit Seattle. Today, Mr. Glaser will host Mr. Kagame at a luncheon where he plans to announce a $1.5 million matching grant for a project that is helping make Rwanda one of the rare success stories in the fight against AIDS. The Access Project, based at Columbia University, New York, is helping Rwanda open 117 AIDS testing and counseling centers – there are 36 so far – and providing the managerial expertise the country needs to begin large-scale treatment for its estimated 500,000 people with AIDS.

Mr. Kagame’s U.S. trip has mostly focused on the 10-year anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. Mr. Glaser points out that AIDS in Africa now claims about 10,000 lives each day, equal to the death rate at the height of the Rwanda killing a decade ago. “It’s a more distributed genocide,” he says.

But he tries to keep his moral outrage from clouding his business judgment. Josh Ruxin, director of the Access Project, says Mr. Glaser grills him about numbers of people tested and clinics opened. “He wants those types of tangible results,” he says. Mr. Glaser already has given the Access Project about $1.7 million; to get the additional money, Mr. Ruxin needs to raise a further $1 million by the end of this month.

“We want to bring other investors in,” Mr. Glaser says. “We want this project to scale up.”