At Acumen Fund, our focus on metrics has become an integral part of everything we do. Understanding the social impact and financial performance of our investments is critical to informing our portfolio decision-making process and providing support to our investment enterprises. Over the past few years, building on other established approaches, we have worked to develop a methodology for assessing our investments that is practical, understandable and useful to our ongoing work. This concept paper outlines an analytical tool we affectionately refer to as BACO (for best available charitable option) that helps us to understand the social impact and cost-effectiveness of our investment, as compared to other charitable options that address the same issue. It continues to be a work in progress and is not without its limitations, but it does provide a framework for how we think about delivering critical goods and services in health, housing and water to the poor.

I’m just back from India with the board, jet-lagged but excited by the trip and the commitment of so many stakeholders –  our board, our India team, our investees, our advisors. We are building a real community, and it is this group of people in India and elsewhere who are responsible for the powerful changes we are seeing. Cate Muther gave me Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss to read on the plane, and I completed it just as the plane was arriving at JFK. I couldn’t recommend it more highly – it is a book about India and the scars of colonialization, of the diaspora and of humans of different classes and types trying to make sense out of an increasingly complex world. It should be required reading for people interested in our issues of building viable solutions to poverty through market-driven approaches.

Ms. Desai begins the book with a poem by Jorge Luis Borges:

Boast of Quietness

Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigious than meteors.
The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside.
Sure of my life and my death, I observe the ambitious and would like to understand them.
Their day is greedy as a lariat in the air.
Their night is a rest from the rage within steel, quick to attack.
They speak of humanity.
My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty.
They speak of homeland.
My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword, the willow grove’s visible prayer as evening falls.
Time is living me.
More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous multitude.
They are indispensable, singular worthy of tomorrow.
My name is someone and anyone.
I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn’t
expect to arrive

My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty. Until we can really see ourselves in each other, we are not going to create the future we imagine based on the fundamental principle of human equality. It will require a reimagining of how we organize ourselves and our resources to best serve the most people possible so that everyone of us can hope to live lives with the dignity of choice. Desai brilliantly reminds us of how easily people are stripped of that choice in most every society on earth, so it is our work to see where even the most basic human dignities are unavailable and to do what we can to build those systems that best release human energies on a widescale basis.

We were pleased that one of our investments, Scojo, was recently profiled in The Economist. In additon to discussing the Scojo model, the article highlights its partnership with another Acumen Fund investment, Drishtee. By facilitating collaborations like this (and a similar one with Medicine Shoppe), Acumen Fund is helping Scojo to expand its distribution and reach in rural India.

Acumen Fund has just issued our Winter 2007 update, which highlights our activities over the past quarter. (If you don’t already receive it by e-mail, you may want to sign up here.)

We’ve also published Jacqueline’s journal from her recent trip to Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa. Jacqueline shares her first-hand experiences with our investments and with individuals who are benefiting from them.