Acumen Fund celebrated its fifth birthday this week. It is hard to believe in some ways, exciting to think about in all ways. On April 1, 2001, Acumen Fund was officially registered as a public charity. Since then, we have focused on building sustainable and scalable organizations that deliver affordable healthcare, water and housing to the poor. These efforts have helped yield significant social returns, including the following:

• More than six million Africans each year have access to life-saving long-lasting insecticide treated malaria bednets.
• Almost 7,000 farmers (or 35,000 people) have seen their crops and incomes improve significantly through the purchase of drip irrigation systems.
• 12,000 women in Pakistan have access to credit and borrowed to build their small businesses and improve their incomes.
• 430,000 low-cost health care services have been provided to rural Kenyans.
• 18,000 South Africans are receiving anti-retroviral treatments through networks of private clinics.
• More than 5,000 people in Southern India have access to affordable, clean water for the first time.
• More than 2,000 people, most of them women, now have steady jobs.

In all, millions of people who make less than $4 a day have been touched by the goods and services supported by Acumen Fund.

Five years. We’ve come a long way, worked hard, contributed to change, learned a lot. At the end of the day, change is about people. We are proud to be part of a community – of extraordinary entrepreneurs, partners, advisors, corporations and friends- that believes that the best way to solve social problems is through market-oriented approaches that begin with understanding who the poor are and then working with them to create effective business models. We have learned so much about identifying entrepreneurs, structuring financial instruments that make sense in difficult markets, following up and building relationships, and what it takes to start moving toward scale and sustainability.

With imagination comes responsibility. Everyone associated with Acumen Fund has real imagination. We can imagine a world where every human being has the opportunity to decide how to care for their children, to educate and feed them, to protect them from harm. We can and must, therefore, do something to make this real. Acumen Fund wants to help the world get smarter about how we spend resources to solve tough problems. The past five years have convinced us that we’ve created the right runway and are ready for take-off. Thanks to everyone who has helped us lay the groundwork. We’re looking forward to doing more than dreaming a world – we’re looking forward to changing it with you.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 6th, 2006 at 2:55 pm and is filed under Acumen News, On the Ground. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.