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
When I first went to Africa, I thought that I was personally going to save the continent, if not the world.
The best change that comes to the world is when all parties are seeing each other as equal, and all parties have the opportunity to be transformed. That really goes back to the idea of dignity.
I was encouraged to break all the rules but to take the best of philanthropy, the best of investing, and the best of development finance, and experiment with new ways to create this venture capital model of using philanthropy to back patient capital investments, and then build solutions that were measured in terms of the kind of impact and change they were making on people's lives and in the world, not just on the financial return.
Impact investing has become a broad umbrella that includes all investing with a focus on both financial return and social impact, but in its best form, impact investing prioritizes impact over returns and achieves outcomes that traditional investing cannot.
I am an insomniac. Most of my nights include a moment of wakening. Often I will make my way to the kitchen to make tea and read for awhile.
I've been working on issues of poverty for more than 20 years, and so it's ironic that the problem that and question that I most grapple with is how you actually define poverty. What does it mean?
As both developed and developing nations search for alternative sources of energy in response to the growing energy crisis, we at Acumen Fund believe that investing in entrepreneurs who provide innovative energy solutions is an increasingly critical part of the solution.
The older I get, the more determined I feel to do whatever I can to help release that human potential somehow. Not in a fluffy way nor in a hardcore way. But in that middle ground, that marriage of love and power. I'm not afraid of either.
My whole life has been spent with people who have taken every knock in the world. No advantages. Yet they greet you with a big smile, they give you what they have, and they keep coming back. They are the fighters.
I feel like I'm a relentless, pragmatic, determined optimist.
On a macro level, four billion people on Earth make less than four dollars a day.
President Kennedy said that those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. I would say that the converse is true.
Acumen Fund is my prayer in response to genocide and what happened in Rwanda.
In India, we now see many highly qualified professionals ready to work in the rural hinterland and in their own towns and cities to tackle development issues directly without depending much on the government.