Jacqueline Novogratz
Jacqueline Novogratz
Jacqueline Novogratz is an American entrepreneur and author. She is the founder and CEO of Acumen, a non-profit global venture capital fund whose goal is to use entrepreneurial approaches to address global poverty. Acumen has invested over $90 million of patient capital in 80 businesses that have impacted more than 125 million people in the past year. Any money returned to Acumen is reinvested in enterprises serving the poor. Currently, Acumen has offices in New York, Mumbai, Karachi, Nairobi, and...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBusinesswoman
CountryUnited States of America
Poverty is too complex to be answered with a one-size-fits-all approach, and if there is any place that illustrates that complexity, as well as a better way forward, it is Rwanda.
Africa can stun you in an instant. It can throw floods and drought and disease at you, sometimes all at the same time. In the next moment, it will tease you with its magnificent beauty, so even if you don't forget, you can find a way to forgive. Ultimately, it keeps you coming back for more.
The only way to end poverty, to make it history, is to build viable systems on the ground that deliver critical and affordable goods and services to the poor, in ways that are financially sustainable and scaleable. If we do that, we really can make poverty history.
The only way we really create change is to enter any situation with the humility to listen and to recognize the world as it is, and then the audacity to dream what it could be.
I would like philanthropists to take more risks and invest more in risk capital.
What we yearn for as human beings is to be visible to each other.
Philanthropy is no longer about writing a check for $10,000 to the opera.
Leaders can get stuck in groupthink because they're really not listening, or they're listening only to what they want to listen to, or they actually think they're so right that they're not interested in listening. And that leads to a lot of suboptimal solutions in the world.
On a macro level, four billion people on Earth make less than four dollars a day.
Money earned by men would not always reach to their wives and children.
Through the Fellows Program, Acumen Fund prepares future global leaders with the tools necessary to drive significant social change.
What farmers gain most of all from the increase in agricultural productivity, of course, is choice.
When I see people that are my age and reaching 50, the ones that are really sparkly and full of joy are the ones that are committed to something bigger than themselves.
We see very, very high rates of C-sections, Cesarean sections, in India. Lots of reasons for it, high levels of malnutrition have meant that women have very small pelvic areas often, so if they have larger babies, it's very hard to deliver.