This post was originally produced for Forbes.

Social entrepreneurs can learn from the global effort to fight polio. In the first decade of this century, efforts to vanquish the disease once and for all stalled. With an injection of capital and insight from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative or GPEI launched an “end game strategy” near the middle of this decade, driving an acceleration of progress.

Rotary International first organized the global effort to fight polio in the mid-1980s. With help from the U.S. CDC, World Health Organization and UNICEF, the effort has become one of the biggest global public health initiatives in history. (Full disclosure: I have been hired to speak to Rotary audiences about polio eradication.)

The number of cases dropped from about 350,000 per year in the mid-1980s to fewer than 1,000 documented cases in 2001 but little progress was made over next ten years. In 2010, more than 1300 cases were documented. While trem…

Endgame Strategy Recognizes That What Got Us…

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