Friction of wealth and poverty sparks idea to help kids.

In a flash, a simple idea that would make a world of difference hit Robert Scott.

The 44-year-old lawyer from Jacksonville Beach, general counsel to Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide, the parent company of Sheraton and Westin hotels, was in Ethiopia working on a luxury hotel. Built by a Saudi sheik with the vision to create the grandest hotel in all of Africa, it dripped with glitzy finery.

The next day, the Brussels-based attorney was watching a BBC documentary about extreme poverty in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, where hungry street children rummage for beans dropped at the market.

"Here I am working on a hotel that is just an absolute masterpiece, I mean really over the top," Scott recalled. "When our guests come and stay in the hotel, I thought, 'They may leave and not know what is going on in this city.'"

That dramatic juxtaposition of wealth and poverty sparked this great notion: What if hotel guests were asked to add $1 to their bill to help the poor people of Africa?

"It came in a flash. At first, I thought, 'Don't be ridiculous! You won't get it through the corporation.' It was such a powerful idea for me, yet I thought, "This is so easy. Can someone point out what's wrong with this? Am I missing something? Why hasn't someone done this before?'"

So Scott went to his boss, who encouraged him to investigate the matter further.

Four years later, Scott's idea has netted $3 million for the "Check Out for Children" initiative that has helped immunize more than 210,000 African babies against six deadly diseases: polio, tetanus, diphtheria, whooping cough, tuberculosis and measles.

In between, Scott prepared the project as meticulously as a legal brief for his most important case.

He checked out various charitable agencies an chose could UNICEF, where he Could get more bang for the buck in helping people.

UNICEF, Scott said, "has the biggest breadth and biggest reach because of its relationship with the United. Nations," and doesn't waste dollars in a "huge administrative black hole."

He wanted to make sure the program accounted for the contributions and that the good achieved could be measured.

The UNICEF's Universal Child Immunization Program assured that for $15 a child can be immunized against the six most deadly diseases that kill 35,000 children a day worldwide.

But first Scott had to sell the idea to the managers of the individual hotels in the corporation

"One of my fears was that they would say, `Don't tell me what to...