TV Guide, June 14, 2010
Editor's Pick of the Week

Melissa Hank

'Office' space

On The Office, Rainn Wilson plays scheming suck-up Dwight Schrute, but apparently the actor has a bit of a political side.

Actually, he's more of a freestyle independent ­ in an appearance on Real Time With Bill Maher, he revealed that he'd voted for Republican, Green Party and Democratic candidates in the past.

So I'm not surprised to see the 44-year-old Emmy-nominated actor narrating the PBS documentary The New Recruits, which follows three business students-turned-social entrepreneurs who believe that capitalism can end global poverty.

Yup, you read that right. Rather than plugging socialism for that altruistic goal, they lean to the seemingly counter-intuitive ideology of capitalism ­ social entrepreneurship, to be exact.

They spend one year working with start-up businesses selling drip irrigation in Pakistan, LED lights in India and toilet services in Kenya, battling to market to customers who earn less than $4 per day.

The Canadian Centre for Social Entrepreneurship describes the trend as combining "the heart of business with the heart of the community through the creativity of the individual."

The students in the doc have a simple plan: to make poor people pay for critical goods and services so that they're sustainable rather than doling them out on a need-to-have basis. Another plus, they claim, is that the poor benefit from being treated as customers instead of beggars.

"Capitalism has been getting a bad rap lately," says co-director and co-producer Jeremy Newberger in a release. "From Michael Moore to Gordon Gekko, the system is portrayed as inherently corrupt and broken. Our film shows honest, generous people attempting to use capitalist principles to uplift rather than exploit."

Well, that'll be refreshing, given the large-scale scandals that have rocked the news lately, from Bernie Madoff to Goldman Sachs and beyond.

"The challenge, of course, is that poor people also have to Œbuy in' to the idea," added Newberger. "Social entrepreneurship has not been a series of feel-good success stories, and we had no interest in representing it that way."

Think of it as another experiment in a burgeoning field to end a global crisis. Almost half the world — over three billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day, according to globalissues.org. Don't we owe it to humanity to explore every possible solution?

The New Recruits airs Tuesday, June 15, at 10 p.m. ET on PBS (check TVGuide.ca listings for local times).