(FORTUNE Small Business) – At age 67, Dr. Scott Harrison is seeing the world. With a travel schedule that would rival Kofi Annan's, he's home a mere two weeks in a five-month span. But instead of a Tuscan hillside, you're more likely to find Harrison in the Kenyan bush, working with sick children. An orthopedic surgeon and medical entrepreneur, Harrison is founder and CEO of CURE International, a nonprofit chain of pediatric teaching hospitals. CURE now runs six hospitals—three in Africa and one each in Afghanistan, the Dominican Republic, and Honduras. Two more are opening this year, in Ethiopia and Zambia, and six others are planned. Each hospital is growing fast too: In 1999, CURE's first facility, in Kijabe, Kenya, performed 895 operations; last year that same hospital performed 2,100.

Before he launched CURE, Harrison co-founded a for-profit chain of rehabilitation clinics called Rehab Hospital Service Corp. He and his partner sold the company in 1984 for about $125 million. Harrison joined a maker of orthopedic devices called Kirschner Medical, based in Timonium, Md., where he was CEO until 1995.

Along the way Harrison had developed an interest in helping sick kids in poor countries. In the mid-1980s he was asked by a colleague in Malawi to teach spinal surgery to doctors there. He and his wife returned to Africa frequently, and those experiences laid the groundwork for CURE. "It was what I had been preparing for without even knowing it," he says.

Today CURE is managed like a for-profit business. Its hospitals run the same computer programs used by U.S. healthcare companies to measure productivity. It has a staff of 538, including 51 physicians—three from the U.S., three from Britain, and 45 from the countries where the hospitals are located. One of the U.S. doctors, Benjamin Warf, studied at Harvard and taught neurosurgery at the University of Kentucky. His work is so admired that Brown University Medical School is sending a resident to Uganda just to train with him.

As its name implies, CURE aims to treat curable disabilities such as hydrocephalus (a swelling of the head caused by fluid in the brain), cleft palate, and clubfoot. It does not focus on patients with such illnesses as AIDS or cancer, but it will treat anyone who shows up. All six hospitals are still fully funded by CURE (of the $5.3 million it raised in fiscal 2004, 28% came from Harrison and the rest from donors). The goal is to make the hospitals self-sustaining by allocating a portion of each facility's rooms to patients who can pay for treatment. CURE also aims to teach modern medicine to local doctors, who can then perform certain procedures on their own. Consider that some 1,250 children in Kenya are born each year with clubfoot, a genetic disorder. A CURE doctor can correct the condition with surgery, but if he trains five local doctors in the procedure, five times as many children can be helped. Last year 340 such procedures were performed at CURE's hospital in Kenya. "We're creating an infrastructure that allows children with that problem to get treatment," Harrison says.

In addition to medical care, CURE offers spiritual sustenance through a ministry in each hospital. Harrison, a Protestant, emphasizes that CURE is inclusive and nondenominational. "I've prayed with Muslims," he says.

His travels are seldom dull. On a trip to Afghanistan in 2002, a few months after U.S. troops arrived, he negotiated a land deal with a local warlord who had reportedly just hanged one of his enemies (a man who was said to have shot the warlord's father). Wooing foreign power brokers is a crucial part of Harrison's job. "This is what it takes to run a network of children's hospitals" in developing countries, he says.

Harrison sees the rewards of his largess on a daily basis. A favorite story concerns a 10-year-old Kenyan boy who was abandoned by his parents when they became overwhelmed by his health problems. The boy, brought to the Kijabe hospital by a woman in his village, was paralyzed from the waist down. He had lost control of his bowels and bladder and suffered from life-threatening epileptic seizures—symptoms that were caused mostly by an abscess that was pressing on his spinal cord and causing high fevers. (Apart from the burden of paying for treatments, many African families regard a disabled child as a curse on the entire village.) After Harrison performed surgery to free the abscess and fuse the boy's vertebrae, his fever disappeared, control of his bowels and bladder returned, and the seizures stopped.

Six weeks later the boy returned to thank Harrison. He walked with a limp, but other than that he was healthy. Standing next to him was a man Harrison had never seen before—the boy's father. "They were able to take him back because now they saw him as a child who had worth," Harrison says.

The stories of the children he couldn't save stay with him too, but Harrison says his faith motivates him to get on the next plane. "Seeing how God can work in your life to affect the lives of others is a very special experience," he says. "I get up every day now and I just can't wait."