Editor’s note: Fareed Zakaria will be hosting an online discussion about his new book, The Post American World, on Monday May 12 at 3:00 PM EST.  Visit the Washington Post web site for details.

This is a powerful article (The Rise of the Rest; Newsweek - May 3) by Acumen advisor Fareed Zakaria, who argues there is a case for real optimism in the world. In fact, he believes – as do I – that we are living in one of the most important moments in history. There is less violence today, more resources, and more interdependence than ever before. The key challenge for the United States will be to recognize the changing nature of a world where there are many players – and the wonderful benefits that can come of that.

For Acumen, our challenge is to help “push the inevitable”, as John Gardner used to say, and identify and scale those innovations that help all people on earth gain access to the goods and services they need to solve their own problems. Through our work, we can be a further reminder that we are a single world, each of us dependent on the action – and inaction – of players all across the globe; and that we have the collective opportunity to solve those problems of poverty that most vex our ability to leave peacefully and prosperously.

I urge you to take a few minutes and read this article.

Today, April 1, marks Acumen Fund’s seventh birthday. Seven years; the so-called age of reason, a time for making the move from fledgling organization to an institution - with a robust heart and mind, legs growing stronger all the time and still abounding with energy. Reflecting today, I’m amazed at how quickly time has passed, how much has changed, how much has been accomplished, how we’re just getting started.

Seven years ago, we set out to build an institution that would help change philanthropy, build more focus and accountability into solving big problems, and use the market as a guide to listening to poor people as customers and not as passive recipients of charity. We were a team of four with no road map. I remember our first COO, Dan Toole (now an Advisory Board member), saying it felt like we were on the 20th story, building a terrace beneath our feet, brick by brick with no safety net below.

We were experimenting with new language (”investors, never donors!”) and new ways of doing things. We found twenty extraordinary individuals willing to support our new idea that most people didn’t fully understand and some thought was outright crazy or just plain wrong. And Acumen Fund was off, letting the work teach us, making mistakes and learning from them, gaining momentum with each step.
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I had the honor to play a small part in the last session of the Skoll Foundation’s World Forum this year.

The first speaker, Paul Collier - author of The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It - is a longtime hero and advisor to Acumen Fund. He spoke of the need to move beyond thinking about the bottom billion as consumers of products but rather as producers. He went on to talk about the need to think in broader terms about bringing a combination of business skills, public finance to enable the business environment, and real and concerted public action to bear. Mr. Collier also discussed the critical need to focus on job creation and on bringing affordable basic services like water, healthcare, housing, energy and education to the poor. It was thrilling to hear him, and I could only feel pushed to get better and smarter in taking our models for service delivery - and job creation - to scale, in part, through more effective partnerships with governments and philanthropies.

Paul Farmer - founder of Partners in Health and an eloquent advocate for human rights and public health - spoke of the need to focus more on social justice issues, to realize we are truly one world now and that the rich need to change if the poor are ever to have a chance. The clinic he is building in Rwanda is world class and, most important to Paul himself, brings dignity to the low-income members of the community it serves.

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I applaud James Surowiecki for raising the issues he does in his March 17 column in The New Yorker. He cites the importance of microfinance as a critical innovation that delivers a basic service — credit — to low-income people in a way they can access and at a price they can afford. He then goes onto say that not everyone is an entrepreneur and that there is a much needed role for developing small and medium enterprises that actually employ people and don’t expect everyone to be an entrepreneur.

In my years of working directly with microfinance in the 1980s, I was struck by how appreciated access to credit was by nearly everyone. For the first time, women could access not only credit for strengthening their small businesses like selling tomatoes at the market but they also could improve their lives by purchasing refrigerators or improving their homes. Microcredit is a way to strengthen access, connect the very poor to a community (which has enormous social value that is very difficult to measure) and most important, expands choice and the ability for poor people to solve their own problems. The design and philosophy of microcredit thus has much to teach those interested in ending poverty. (more…)

The Wall Street Journal published this very good op-ed from Bill Easterly, who actually is sometimes mischaracterized as being only market-driven. In fact, he is a big supporter of social entrepreneurs and of using the market to bring efficiencies while also recognizing the need to address market failures with other means. What excites me most about this is that we’re seeing a growing dialogue around poverty with much smarter thinking on all sides than we’ve seen in a long time.

This article points to the power of the long-lasting insecticide treated nets on reducing malaria infections and deaths in Rwanda and Ethiopia. Rwanda is a very organized country with an excellent record of executing on the kind of distribution for nets and Coartem - and the results they have achieved are thrilling to see. A to Z in Tanzania produces ten million long lasting nets annually now, and our investee ABE in Kenya produces artemisinin for about four million doses of Coartem monthly (nearly 50 million annually). These are both examples of investing in local entrepreneurs to produce local products that save lives in Africa. We’re proud to be a small part of this change. Next steps toward eradicating malaria altogether must be to improve execution on distribution and delivery through countries without the order and compact geography of Rwanda.

Yesterday’s New York Times included an interesting article about Egypt’s subsidized bread program. It underscores potential pitfalls of huge government subsidies and is worth reading.

This LA Times article on mission-related investing highlights some of Acumen’s partners like the Rockefeller and Kellogg foundations. We applaud the shifts we’re seeing in philanthropy that recognize the power of investing to effect change – as well as the need to align philanthropic goals with the many tools that foundations have, including their investing ability.

I know I just wrote about the unrest in Pakistan, so it pains me to reach out to our community to write today about Kenya. As you know, there has been a great deal of violence and unrest since the recent election in Kenya. Much of the violence has occurred in the slums where I worked twenty years ago and where some of our investees are working hard to effect change today. Just so you know, our team and our Fellows are safe, and today in Nairobi, most offices, including ours, were open and functioning.  Tomorrow, a million-man march is expected, and we will be keeping close tabs on the situation. At the same time, some members of Acumen investee Jamii Bora have seen their businesses hurt or destroyed. These are people who have made great strides through their own efforts and hard work since I worked in those slums more than two decades ago, and so it is more important than ever to ensure that peace is restored so that people can be helped to recover their losses and get back on track. (more…)

The Acumen Fund team is devastated by the tragic events in Pakistan. We mourn the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and are worried about the many families and individuals affected all across the country. I wanted to let our community know where things stand, especially as far as the Acumen community goes, and we will keep in touch as events unfold.

The major cities are experiencing a great deal of unrest — riots and a general breakdown so that all of the shops have been closed and emotions remaining very tense. The government has declared three days of national mourning but has indicated that January 8 general elections remain on schedule. 

All of our team members and our two Acumen fellows are safe and at home. Our investees’ teams also are safe, though a couple of TRDP vehicles were attacked.  We send our thoughts and prayers to team members, partners, investees, advisors, customers and friends, as well as to Pakistan as a whole. It has been a remarkable journey for Acumen Fund to have created such a strong community that has never been more needed.

Please keep Pakistan in your hearts as we move into 2008.

With hopes for a more peaceful world,
Jacqueline

Doris Lessing’s Nobel acceptance speech is painfully beautiful in its raw elegance, and a reminder not only of the contradictions of our great world, but of the importance of literature, of stories, of reminding us all of who we are. If you don’t have time to read the whole thing, the next few lines are a must-read, but, as for me, I will carry the picture of the dusty African woman reading the paragraph from Anna Karenina at the counter of the store in Zimbabwe for a long time….

We have a treasure-house - a treasure - of literature, going back to the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans. It is all there, this wealth of literature, to be discovered again and again by whoever is lucky enough to come on it. A treasure. Suppose it did not exist. How impoverished, how empty we would be.

We own a legacy of languages, poems, histories, and it is not one that will ever be exhausted. It is there, always. (more…)

This interesting article discusses the use of smart subsidies to bring critical products - in this case, fertilizer - to poor farmers at prices they can afford so that they can change their own lives. It is also a story of how many variables go into success, which means that attribution for what works and what doesn’t isn’t always straightforward. We need constant experimentation and an honest appraisal of results, of successes and of failures too. It is exciting to see an increased dialogue around some of these issues in papers like The New York Times.