Balancing skill with will

Acumen Fund CEO Jacqueline Novogratz is traveling. Her latest journal entry from Pakistan follows.

September 3, 2006 – Karachi, Pakistan

I love the Karachi papers. For a country that jails many of its journalists, the press is surprisingly free and certainly outspoken. Most of the articles are critiquing the government’s handling of the death and burial of Nawab Bugti, the tribal leader from Balochistan, one of Pakistan’s poorest regions. Of course, adjacent to these articles are columns about cosmetic surgery’s rising popularity and the MTV awards. We live in a world where the rich are living in different worlds entirely than the poor, in their shared countries. Perhaps it has always been this way – it is just that today, the differences are not only so stark but so readily, constantly visible.

On one opinion page is a mix of writers taken from other papers around the world – Jeffrey Sachs, Noam Chomsky, Kalpana Sahni. The latter writes about non-violence and Gandhi’s legacy. She points to a quote from Gandhiji’s mentor, Leo Tolstoy:

I sit on a man’s back, choking him. and making him carry me, and yet, assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by any means possible, except getting off his back.

Getting off his back. Privilege is not sacrificed easily. What we are trying to do is remove constraints so that the poor can have more control over their own lives. But larger societal forces need to change as well. Good governance, transparency, rule of law, less distortion in the marketplace – all this is needed to give the poor a real chance. Acumen Fund focuses on one part of this – providing examples of what can work when markets are used to deliver basic services; and in doing so, we hope to better articulate what is needed to create a policy climate that fosters positive change.

I spend all of Saturday and Sunday with our Pakistani team in a mini-retreat. Our team is young, smart and committed. I could feel neither luckier nor prouder to work with them. Aun has done a great job putting the office together, working through the miserable bureaucracy that is so much a part of Pakistan’s reality. He told me he knew it would be tough to get things set up but hadn’t planned on them being so ridiculous as to be laughable. Finding a suitable space was the easy part, though it took more than two months. Getting the office set up, with a new generator for the many brownouts that are part of Karachi, computers, services, all that is needed – days could seem endless. But we have an office now, and it is to Aun’s credit. At the same time, he found an apartment for his own family, though they found such high levels of salinity in their water that they cannot bathe their 10-month-old at home. The experience has given him a better sense of what it takes for the poor to start businesses and navigate unruly systems without any resources to make life easier.

One of the biggest issues social change-oriented funds face is balancing empathy with results. This is a major theme of the day’s discussions. Some of the most wonderful leaders focused on the poor have a difficult time translating vision into action. On the other hand, we also see many entrepreneurs with the skill to roll out large and efficient systems that never reach the truly poor. We use a will/skill matrix to force us to recognize choices we are making and the implications for our overall time spent on each investment and the results we are likely to gain. The jury is still out as to whether those individuals and organizations who are high on will and low on skill will create viable enterprises that provide as much impact as those who are high on skill and lower on will, and vice versa. Ideally, we will have a mix of investments and stay focused on measuring the changes we see both in quantitative terms and in the changing drive and concerns of the entrepreneurs.

As we discuss the implications for choosing investment opportunities amid scarce resources (time being even more important than money), Adnan Asdar drops in. Having advisors of the quality of Adnan, who care enough about what we’re doing to spend a couple of hours with the team on a Saturday, is a big deal to us, providing needed experience, wisdom and a boost in confidence and energy. He is going to work with the team on looking at a number of opportunities, all of which could use his project management skill and nose for identifying serious entrepreneurs.