Sachs and Novogratz Find Common Ground

At a time when the world is experiencing an incredible economic crisis, it was powerful to sit in Lehman Brothers’ Midtown Manhattan office Tuesday night to hear Jeffery Sachs, head of the Millennium Project and Director of the Earth Institute, and Jacqueline Novogratz, CEO of Acumen Fund, speak about how to address the issues of global poverty.

More than 300 Lehman employees and guests filled the auditorium, listening to two of the most influential leaders in the social sector discuss the role of public and private approaches in alleviating global poverty. Millennium Promise and Acumen Fund have each received significant philanthropic support from Lehman Brothers, and Lehman Brothers’ $5 million gift to Acumen Fund made them our first Corporate Steward in our $100 million capital campaign.

The evening served as an opportunity for Sachs and Novogratz to explore ways to bring together top-down and bottom-up approaches to fight poverty. And while we would all love to know that there are simple, straightforward solutions, it was clear from the speakers’ comments that multiple approaches are needed to tackle poverty.

This idea was wonderfully illustrated by Jacqueline’s vivid story of the seven-foot-tall sunflowers growing in the middle of the Thar desert of Pakistan. Local smallholder farmers can grow these sunflowers because they are finally able to receive water through the use of a micro drip irrigation technology distributed by a local entrepreneur and Acumen Fund investee, Micro Drip, in addition to a government subsidy that provided solar panels to power the generators that extract groundwater.

Jeffrey Sachs used this example to illustrate a critical challenge: in places where there is no water, no grid, and no access to roads, the ability of people to pull themselves up out of poverty is going to be limited, and we need a blended approach in which charity still plays a significant role in lifting people out of poverty. In Jacqueline’s example, the government played a critical role in supporting the farmers with free solar panels when the price of diesel rose dramatically. And so quickly we see that there is a space where the macro meets the micro — not only in halls of the United Nations or Lehman Brothers, but also in the 110-degree heat of the Pakistan desert, surrounded by a field of bright yellow sunflowers.

Similarly, in multiple villages across Tanzania, Millennium Promise is purchasing and distributing bed nets produced and manufactured by A to Z Textiles. A to Z’s bed net production was funded by an Acumen Fund loan of $325,000 in 2003, and they are now East Africa’s manufacturer of long-lasting insecticide-treated bed nets, currently producing 10 million nets per year and employing over 6,000 low-income, female workers. A to Z sells the nets to large aid agencies that are working to carry out the Millennium Development Goals initiated by Sachs.

As the crowd shuffled out of event, I found myself reflecting on the conversation filled with a sense of hope that these integrated solutions are beginning to solve some of the most complex problems of poverty. But, at the same time, I also recognized that we have a long way to go before we can turn the desert into a field of sunflowers.