One billion people on Earth – that’s one person in every five – lack access to safe drinking water, according to the United Nations. EarthSky spoke to Jacqueline Novogratz, whose organization, Acumen Fund, lends seed money to small businesses that provide clean water, health care, and energy at a low cost to the poor. The goal, Novogratz says, is to find a way to bring these essential services to low income people not just today, but in a way that’s sustainable over time.
Jacqueline Novogratz We invest in those intrepid entrepreneurs, who are willing to see the poor not as recipients, but as vital customers that want to change their lives.
Acumen Fund has invested more than $40 million in companies in Pakistan, India, Kenya, and Tanzania. That’s a small amount compared to the billions in aid by big charities and governments.
Jacqueline Novogratz: But we’ve seen those companies not only create 24,000 jobs, but literally bring tens of millions of individuals services that people would otherwise not have access to. It’s opened up an industry in rural areas that never existed.
Novogratz doesn’t expect overnight success. Instead, her organization uses what she calls ‘patient capital’ – that is, slow investments of a year or longer that ‘patiently’ wait for the small business to take root before expecting returns. Our thanks today to The Economist – fresh thinking for the ideas economy.
Jacqueline Novogratz will be a featured speaker at The Economist Innovation Conference on March 23-24, 2010 in Berkeley, California.
We need to think and act small and sustainably not BIG and unsustainably.
We also need to encourage one another to speak truth to power, I suppose. As President Barack H. Obama, (quoting former President Abraham Lincoln) reminded all of us this weekend: we are not bound to win but we are bound to be true; we are not bound to succeed but we are bound to live up to the light we possess.
Many generations of humankind have lived over the past 10,000 years. We would probably not be here if they had not somehow confronted the challenges before them. They evidently did their duty. And here we are. Their challenges may have different from the ones we face now, but likely no more or less difficult. Unlike those who came before us, too many people in my not-so-great generation of greed-mongering elders has evidently chosen to put its collective “head in the sand” as it digs the hole we are in even deeper rather than to stop our reckless and relentless ‘digging’ in favor of facing, addressing and overcoming the human-induced challenges before us. No previous generation could have behaved in so woefully inadequate and supremely arrogant a way when it comes to shaping a realistic response to visible threats to the health and wellbeing of its children. Perhaps necessary changes in behavior toward sustainable lifestyles and a viable future are in the offing.
This is only a guess, but I trust many of us can agree with the common understandings that “Nature bats last” (from the game of baseball) and that Father Greed cannot ultimately rule over Mother Nature. That the idolatry of Father Greed’s Economic Colossus is allowed to rule absolutely in our time is ruinous both to Mother Earth and to the children’s future, yet many too many so-called leaders continue to incentivize patently unsustainable human greediness and regard greed as a virtue. The self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe among us who have invented, engineered, institutionalized and legalized pernicious instruments of avarice and unconscionably labeled them good should be named, shamed, penalized and dismissed. Perhaps the human family could benefit from new leadership and the introduction of different incentives.