Emma Clippinger, right, a Brown University senior, works with AIDS victims in Rwanda to help them grow their own food.

Photo courtesy of Julie Carney

In her student days at Milton Academy, Emma Clippinger was, as she puts it, a “bookworm who just wanted to be a writer.”

But the 23-year-old Brown University senior from Cambridge, Mass., also had a deep interest in global health. When she heard former White House adviser Ira Magaziner speak during her freshman year about a new initiative he was heading for the Clinton Foundation to make HIV/AIDS therapy affordable to the needy around the globe, she told him she was ready to sign on.

By the following summer, in 2006, Clippinger and another intern, Emily Morell, a student at Yale University, were in Rwanda, not fully realizing then that they would soon be founding their own nonprofit group, Gardens for Health International. Over the next two years, it garnered numerous awards and transformed the lives of an estimated 4,000 Rwandans affected by AIDS by providing them with the tools to plant and harvest foods for themselves and families, donate to hospitals and even sell at the market.

When the Clinton Foundation began its work in Rwanda, it did so with the assumption that bringing down the cost of HIV/AIDS therapy — through subsidies and by arranging to bring in less-expensive medications from India — would be enough to put a dent in an AIDS epidemic that was afflicting 5 percent of Rwanda’s 10 million inhabitants. What it didn’t anticipate, Clippinger says, was that many patients were too malnourished to absorb the medication.

“We needed to find a way to ensure that people had enough food and extra calories,” says Clippinger, who recalls being shocked to find that even the hospitals weren’t giving food to AIDS patients as part of their in-patient care.

The solution, as the two saw it, was to develop a way for the people to grow their own food. The government had a policy of giving land to people who had shown an ability to cultivate crops, but people with AIDS were never included because they were seen as too weak.

Using the connections that the Clinton Foundation had with the Rwandan government, Clippinger and Morell spoke to top officials in the summer of 2006 about the possibility of people with AIDS coming together to form food co-ops to till the land.

Officials said there was no money for such a program, but “We told them we’d raise $16,000 to make it happen,” Clippinger recalled.

When Clippinger and Morell got back to their campuses in their sophomore year, they immediately set up a tax-exempt nonprofit organization to solicit donations and grants from friends, families and foundations. By winter break, they had enough money to return to Rwanda and hire two agronomists to teach the AIDS groups how to grow fruits and vegetables that would be far more nutritious and better for them than the starchy foods they had.

And when they returned the next summer they saw even more progress. Some 30 AIDS associations had formed nine cooperatives and were given more than 30 acres to farm.

The project became even more successful than Clippinger dared imagine. The groups are now producing so much food, she says, they can bring food to local hospitals and sell the remaining surplus at a profit.

It proved so successful that the Bush administration decided to use the same approach and help other HIV/AIDS associations in Rwanda form cooperatives as well. The success also allowed Clippinger and Morell to hire a recent Yale graduate, Julie Carney, to oversee the project as their countrywide director.

Their efforts also caught the attention of the business world. At the invitation of the investment banking firm JPMorgan Chase, Clippinger flew back from Africa earlier this year to give a presentation about the efforts, and at the end of the day was awarded a $25,000 prize. Another big award came two weeks ago when an international team of judges chose Clippinger and Morell as the grand prize winners of the Staples Youth Social Entrepreneur competition sponsored by the Staples Foundation for Learning and Ashoka, a global association of social entrepreneurs.

Clippinger said Tuesday that she and Morell are still scrambling to raise about $60,000 in grants, on top of the $130,000 they have already raised. It’s a lot of money to raise in today’s economic climate, she admits, but she also sees a possibility that the organization will be able to offer loans instead of grants because the cooperatives have shown they can make money.

“After graduation, I would love to work on this another year,” she says. But she would also like to see Rwandan ministries and agencies take over much of what the group does, freeing it to turn its attention elsewhere.

Whatever the future holds, she says, is nice to know that just as the Pilgrims were able to gather around the table and to give thanks for the joy of the harvest, many of the people with AIDS in Rwanda are able to celebrate the fruits of their harvest as well.