In the 1980’s, long before Bono’s “One” Initiative and the UN Millenium Development Goals brought extreme poverty into worldwide focus, 25 year old Jacqueline Novogratz left a cushy Wall Street banking job and stepped onto a plane to Kigali, Rwanda with an eye on changing the world. Fast forward more than two decades and a lifetime-worth of challenges to find this amazing and inspiring woman as the founder and CEO of Acumen Fund, a nonprofit venture capital firm that invests in entrepreneurs bringing affordable and sustainable healthcare, water, energy and housing to people earning less than $4 a day.
She tells the story of how she got from there to here in her recently released memoir, The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World. I love the title, which refers to a sweater that she gave away to the Good Will when she was a Freshman in High School. She found it more than 10 years later, her name still on the tag, on the back of a young boy playing on the streets of Rwanda. This seemingly serendipitous event became for Novogratz a metaphor for human interconnectedness and a driving motivation for her continued dedication to helping the worlds poor to help themselves eradicate extreme poverty in their own communities. She tells the story and discusses Acumen Fund, in this interview with Charlie Rose.Â
Read Previous Post