AF Team

Pauline Nguyen is a volunteer who recently participated in an Acumen Fund presentation in Dubai, where Blair Miller presented her experiences managing the Acumen Fund Fellows Program.

I will be the first one to confess that I was pessimistic for the turnout at Blair Miller’s presentation about the Acumen Fund Fellows Program.   The feeling had nothing to do with Blair herself (who is quite fabulous in real life) but rather the type of people and lifestyle that exist in Dubai.

Professionals come to Dubai to work tax-free, live in luxury housing, enjoy fancy brunches, and travel to exotic destinations on the weekend.  In my honest and ugly opinion, Dubai is not a place with a lot of community-minded individuals.

Therefore, it felt very surreal to sit in a theatre in the Mall of the Emirates (Dubai’s excessive mall with its own indoor ski lodge) listening to Blair Miller, Talent Manager at Acumen Fund, promote the Fellows Program to an audience of 45 young professionals.

It was a tall order but even I, comfortable in my own luxury high rise, was inspired by her presentation to think deeply about applying for the Fellows Program.  The key highlight of Blair’s presentation was the focus on Acumen’s past Fellows.  The stories about the Fellows were easy to relate to as they were of the same age and stage in life as most of the audience members. I will assume (by the number of suits and Blackberry devices) that we were an audience between our late 20s and mid 30s, composed mainly of bankers, consultants, and other frustrated people working for the “man”/government. Basically, we were an audience who could use a change and some inspiration in our lives. Blair was telling us more than a story about a Fellow’s work- she was offering an opportunity to change our lives, to be that Fellow that builds more LifeSpring hospitals to bring safe birthing facilities to Indian women. Most expatriates eventually leave Dubai, but the question is:  Where to next?  Acumen’s answer:  Be a Fellow and make a tangible contribution to combating poverty in the developing world!

Another captivating part of the Acumen Fund Fellows Program was the calibre of the chosen participants.  It seemed that every Fellow had at least an expensive MBA and years of outstanding experience on their resume.   While I was a little intimidated, I still understood the message:  Acumen Fund wants the best financial and business minds (i.e. fanatic modelers welcome) to be their representatives in the field.  The Fellows Program is not asking volunteers to go to Africa and hold or adopt babies (no offense to those who do).  Rather, Fellows develop business plans, complex financial models, and contribute their business skills to make a tangible difference in a local social enterprise. Amazing stuff to think about!  Personally, I think it is much cooler and self-rewarding to be able to say “Yeah, I totally modeled five scenarios on how to alleviate India’s water scarcity problem” instead of “Yeah, I modeled five scenarios of a debt equity ratio that would yield the highest IRR.”

I would like to thank the Dubai for Acumen Volunteer Group for reaching out and inspiring us towards a more rewarding lifestyle. The Acumen Fund Fellows presentation was the second event organized by the Dubai Chapter.  I am excited for the Chapter’s next event which will be Acumen Fund’s Inaugural Fundraising Event to be held on April 7th at Cuadro Art Gallery in DIFC (for more information please email DubaiforAcumen@acumenfund.org). The event will be an opportunity to learn more about Acumen Fund and will feature a musical performance, good food and drinks.

I am eager to meet more individuals interested in Acumen Fund’s work, and hope to see you there!

Yasmina Zaidman is Director of Communications at Acumen Fund.

Are you being a linchpin?

I’ve been an avid watcher of “So You Think You Can Dance“ for years, and since reading Linchpin, Seth Godin’s latest book, it has become clear to me why. The show’s name is a little ironic. The kids featured in this competition reality show, who audition from around the country for a chance to become America’s favorite dancer, really can dance. Some have years of training, and some are street dancers, but all of them get on the stage and dance their hearts out, with grace, and flare, picking up new styles effortlessly from week to week. It’s a little embarrassing to be hooked on a reality TV show, but I know I’m not alone.

What the performers on the show do for me is remind me of what it looks like to be an artist. The hunger, the hard work, the courage. And the end result is breathtaking - performances that stay with me for years after the show ends. The show is irresistible because it shows me something, I now realize, that is true about myself. I had never thought of it that way.

Linchpin is about what it takes to be indispensable, to be singularly good at what you do, to create and share the gifts that only you can offer.

Linchpin challenges its readers in a way that previous books by Godin have not. If you’re looking for a new way to think about your marketing strategy, or the best way to harness the power of the internet, this is not the book for you. If you’re willing to consider that you are capable of much more than you are doing now, pick it up. Read it. If you have read Tribes, and have decided to be a leader, then make sure your tribe reads it. If you have decided that you want to make a positive difference in the world, and have ever asked yourself the question - “am I doing enough?”, read it.

But going back to “So You Think You Can Dance,” there is a catch. Linchpin is not about seeking out genius and artistry in others.  I know now that what I love about watching these extraordinary dancers is that it calls out to some part of me that wants to be more. Linchpin has the audacity to suggest that the genius worth watching is YOU.

In Linchpin, Seth is talking, in part, to people whose livelihoods and dignity are at stake in a new economy that ruthlessly downsizes anyone who is dispensable. But he is also talking to people who feel comfortable in their good-enoughness. What’s provocative about the book is his message to those, myself included, who don’t need to become a linchpin in order to save our jobs, but rather to give a gift that we’ve been holding on to. This is the part of the book where I start to wish that “So You Think You Can Dance” wasn’t in between seasons. It’s so much easier to just watch.

The notion of overcoming the resistance, what Seth names that internal sabotage mechanism that keeps us from sharing our gifts with the world, sounds exhausting. And uncomfortable. It means risking failure. But once you see the pattern of your own self-sabotage, which Seth deftly captures as though he’s had a hidden camera trained on you for years, it’s hard to continue as before. I’ve decided that the best way to deal with this daunting set of ideas is to take it on reality-show-style, with a group of peers who share my hunger and curiosity, and are willing to challenge each other to new heights. I know that as more of us at Acumen Fund begin to read this book we’ll be able to create subtle shifts in our own culture - a shift towards more generosity and art, and less credit-seeking and prize winning. We’ll continue to hold ourselves to the highest standards of accountability, but with a new excitement that comes from being a community of linchpins. We may not be dancing, but we are artists in our own way, hoping to bring something new into the world and inspire others to bring their own gifts to the task of ending extreme poverty.

Yasmina Zaidman is Director of Communications at Acumen Fund. She recently returned from vacation in the Dominican Republic, where she personally experienced the importance of access to emergency medical care.

The hospital in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, where Yasmina and her son were fortunate enough to receive treatment.

I try not to think too much about work when I’m on vacation, but when I found myself in the back of an ambulance in the Dominican Republic this past week, I couldn’t help but think about Acumen Fund’s work on improving access to emergency care. I was holding my 17-month old baby in my arms as he vomited into a bed pan, while two young medics stood ready to check his vitals. He had acquired an acute bacterial infection, we later learned, that was leading to mild dehydration. This is a problem with a very simple solution – rehydration, with the optional treatment of antibiotics. Yet this simple solution is often not available, and dehydration is the single greatest cause of infant mortality, leading to the preventable deaths of millions of children under 5 each year.

I know how very preventable these deaths are, in part because I just saw it averted for my son. At every step in the process of getting my son the help he needed I found myself asking: “what would we do if we had no money?” First, there would be no emergency transport to a hospital or clinic (though this was only needed in this case because his illness started while we were at an international airport in a foreign country). There would have been no emergency room to check into with the swipe of a credit card. There would have been no instant diagnostics to check his blood pressure, his heart rate, his white blood cell count, which told us that his infection was bacterial and not viral. And most of all, there would have been no treatment, no IV providing the perfect combination of salt and sugar to help his body absorb the fluids that would keep his 22 lb. body functioning properly.

You don’t need a vivid imagination to see how this situation could have played out differently, and my mind kept switching from my own circumstance, in a relatively clean room, with a nurse and blood test results in hand, to a very different one. I pictured a dirt-floored room in a crowded slum or temporary shelter, my sick child in my arms, a dirty rag to wipe his mouth, and futile attempts to provide water, perhaps itself contaminated, to a child who was not tolerating liquids. I would essentially have to watch and wait to see whether his own immune system’s ability to neutralize the infection and its symptoms would outpace the deadly effects of dehydration. And too often, children lose this battle, with the result, over and over again, of death. On the very island where we just spent our holiday, in a small country just across the border, there are 400,000 children displaced by Haiti’s earthquake. How many of them will face the same illness that my son had? How many of them will survive it?

I take the helplessness I felt as I watched my son getting stuck with needles and consider the situation of a parent who isn’t lucky enough to have access to this basic medical intervention and who can’t perform the basic duty of a parent to protect their child from a preventable catastrophe.

Today, my son is his normal bright and bounding self, picking up words here and there, and anything else he can get his hands on. I’ve never been happier to be home from a vacation in my life. Not only because of the comfort of familiarity after this experience, but also because what I come back to is this work we do at Acumen Fund. The work to bring basic, yet life-sustaining goods and services to people who can’t typically afford them. Whether it is access to emergency care from 1298 in Mumbai, or affordable maternal care in Hyderabad, or rural pharmacies in Kenya, or health insurance in Pakistan, basic healthcare for families should never be out of reach. No parent should have to watch helplessly while their child battles infection when a simple diagnosis and rehydration therapy is so simple and so effective. Getting to that point is not simple, but it is the work I come back to with great gratitude, both for my own circumstances, and for the privilege of doing my own small part to bring access to healthcare to other families.

“Once you don’t have it – that’s when you realize the value”

David Kuria, founder and CEO of Ecotact

When I first journeyed to Kenya in 2004, celebrating the launch of a public toilet facility was one of the last ways I imagined spending a Monday morning – or any morning (or afternoon, or evening), for that matter. In fact, unless I had enjoyed an elephant’s dose of mango juice and was on a 5 hour safari across the Great Rift Valley, I might not have had reason to celebrate a toilet at all.

Six years later, however, armed with the realization that an estimated 2.6 billion people lack access to basic sanitation and 2.2 million die each year from water and sanitation related diseases, I now have billions of reasons to attend toilet parties, an emerging trend in the Nairobi slums thanks to David Kuria and Ecotact. So when the Acumen team received the invite to attend the launch of Ecotact’s 17th Ikotoilet facility last Monday, I practically ran for my dancing shoes.

Sitting under a small tent adjacent to the about-to-be-launched Kawangware Ikotoilet, Rob Katz and I listened eagerly with the 200-plus gatherers inside and spilling out the edges of the makeshift party hall. The crowd – a mix of residents, officials and journalists – engulfed the architecturally distinct Ikotoilet structure. It was clear that Acumen wouldn’t be dancing alone at this party.

The Minister of Public Health and Sanitation and the Chief Public Health Officer also showed up for the celebration. Given the honour of Chief Guests, they both made remarks before cutting the ribbon: this day marks the launch of a noble public-private partnership initiative, as we bring necessary services closer to the people and are no longer dependent on flying toilets.

Part of the media frenzy at the Ikotact launch event

The Kawangware facility is part of Ecotact’s newly implemented slum outreach model; it is now the second Ikotoilet in the informal communities of Kenya. And according to Kuria and the Minister, there will be more Ikotoilets in Kawangware in the near future – extremely exciting news for Acumen as a BoP investor!

Ecotact is experimenting with a school model in the slums as well. After cutting the ribbon at Kawangware – and being mobbed by reporters as she toured the facilities – Minister of Public Health and Sanitation and Kawangware MP Beth Mugo led a delegation to the Dagoretti Secondary School, about 10 minutes away from the new Ikotoilet.

Darogetti students meet Ecotact CEO David Kuria

The school’s 150 students currently use pit latrines. But with funding from the Solid House Foundation, Dagoretti will soon inaugurate a free-for-use Ikotoilet on site. What’s more, a biodigester will generate valuable methane gas, pumped from the toilet to the school’s kitchen.

With facilities in Nairobi’s central business district, city parks, slums and schools, Ecotact is tackling the sanitation problem here in Kenya on many fronts. As an investor and partner with Ecotact, Acumen Fund is eager to continue the celebration with Kuria and his team, as they grow from 17 facilities to a target of more than double that within the next year.

Bio:

Benje is currently a Portfolio Intern in the Agriculture and Energy portfolios in Acumen’s East Africa office. Prior to Acumen, Benje was a management consultant at TecnoServe in Kenya and at PwC in New York. He is currently starting several SMEs in the Nairobi slums, and holds a BS in Business Administration from UC Berkeley.

I’m writing this post on the 16-hr plane ride from New York to Mumbai (via Qatar), thinking about the hectic but exciting past ten days.

Near the end of our time in New York we learned how to shoot and edit videos. Initially, I thought that this video training - with a tough coach teaching us the surprisingly strict conventions for video shooting and editing - was going to be the most difficult part of the week.

But that was before we started the Acumen Fund investment case competition. We split up into two teams, each with five Fellows, and began carefully examining our (simulated but based on real-life) assigned venture’s financial data and business plan. Looking for a success story we could present — and loopholes the Investment Committee may pick up on — we did not leave anything to chance. Market study, risk analysis, social impact, and financial sustainability were just a few of the factors we looked at to convince the Committee to put their money in our investment. A tough, high-stress experience, but definitely one I won’t forget anytime soon.

The minute we closed our cases, while the verdict was still out on our respective investment proposals, we rushed to the Rubin Museum to rehearse our performance for the Investor Gathering the next day. Acumen Fund’s annual IG was the perfect way to end what has been a challenging but extremely rewarding two months in New York. Meeting all of our supporters in person at the IG has shown me just how close knit the community around us really is, and how, as one of our directors puts it, the community is an expression of the power of shared ideas and of uncompromising commitment. I am proud to be part of this organization.

Back here in my uncomfortable plane seat, already falling victim to jetlag-induced insomnia, I take a step back and attempt to give the Fellowship a broader view. While thinking about the future, I can’t help but look at the recent past, with 19 out of the 24 previous Fellows now working in 10 countries as professionals in the social sector. And as I reflect on how I got here, I think about the snowball effect this program has witnessed over the past few months, recently culminating with 568 individuals from 65 countries vying for the ten positions on the 2011 Fellows team.

But looking at the present moment, my thoughts are invariably drawn to my own cohort, all incredibly diverse individuals spanning national, economic, ethnic, religious, social, and political boundaries. As we make our way over to our investee placements, I wonder what they are all thinking on their own plane rides, and what expectations and apprehensions might be racing through their minds when their aircrafts finally touch the ground. For the time being, I am leaving you with a map showing where each of this year’s 10 Fellows will be spending the year.

Stay tuned.

View Acumen Fund 2010 Fellows in a larger map

Deepna Nandiga is currently a Business Development intern in Acumen Fund’s office in Hyderabad. She recently finished a masters degree in Anthropology from Columbia University, with a concentration in International Development. Previously, she worked with Accenture as a Business Consultant and also worked with Relief International, a humanitarian aid and development organization where her work was focused mainly on planning programs in public health, women’s education and microcredit in Darfur, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan. Prior to joining Acumen Fund, she worked for six months with Bhumi, a growing social enterprise with initiatives that target underprivileged communities in Hyderabad.

Rather recently, I found myself as guest in the home of Srinivas Yadav, a small holding sweet-orange farmer living in the Nalgonda District of Andhra Pradesh, an area located on the outskirts of Hyderabad. We ate rice and chicken curry off banana leafs on the floor of his home at lunchtime, which was truly royal treatment. Serving meat as part of a meal is quite an expensive undertaking for farmers like Srinivas, despite owning a substantial portion of land and receiving crop yields of up to ten tons per acre in good months.

I was flanked on either side by a senior professor from the Hyderabad Agriculture University, two government officials who work on subsidy schemes for farmers and a director of Safal, an organization that tries to provide a direct link between fruit and vegetable growers and consumers set up jointly by the Indian government and Mother Dairy Ltd. The purpose of the visit was for Acumen Fund to better understand the problems Indian farmers face and to look for opportunities for innovation in the highly inefficient producer-to-consumer agricultural supply chain. At one point in conversation with the professor from the Agriculture University, he mentioned the recently proposed government Right to Food Act. On further inquiry, he said, “Yes, in your country you have rights like the right to free speech and the right to bear arms and in our country we have the right to food for every person.” His words made a strong impact on me. The thought of having to guarantee something so basic to human survival and something I take for granted on a daily basis shifted my paradigms of freedom and human rights. Like many other experiences during my time here in India, it was quite the reality check.

Unlike the Constitution of the United States that protects mainly the infringement of civil rights, since its conception in 1950, the Indian Constitution ensures socio-economic freedoms as well. This is for good reason; the 2006 National Family Health Survey showed that the child under-nutrition rate in India is 46%, almost double that of sub-Saharan Africa, which is economically poorer than India (Source: India Development Blog) The Right to Food Act, which is currently under debate in the Indian Congress is the latest iteration of the government’s legislative attempt to end hunger.

In a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi has made a strong pitch for providing the 35 kg of cereals at Rs.3 a kg that has been proposed under the new Act each month to the poor. The Food Security Act has also received a thumbs-up from Nobel Laureate and economist Amartya Sen, famous for his human-development centered approach to solving problems of poverty. The current debate focuses on the terms of the Act and on defining the threshold of the below poverty line (BPL) population. By one committee estimation, 77% of the Indian population or 836 million people are not able to spend more than Rs. 20 a day, which will not buy more than two square meals per day. (Source: Deccan Chronicle). Ironically, often those facing hunger are the farmers themselves. Lately, every news report I watch mentions the dire state of farmers due to the unusually dry weather of the last few months over the Indian plains. I’ve learned however, that weather is not the only limiting factor in farmers’ inability to provide for themselves. An estimated 200,000 farmers have committed suicide in Andhra Pradesh over the last 15 years.

India’s hunger problem more than anything else, lies in inefficient distribution. In fact, India is the third largest agriculture producer in the world, following China and the United States. As I witnessed at Srinivas Yadav’s farm, lack of access to markets, transport inability, a lack of cold storage options and a number of other reasons relating to supply chain inefficiencies are to blame.

In spite of these bleak statistics, the day’s conversations on the farm left me feeling optimistic. It was an example of the times I get most excited about my work here. Acumen Fund is finding innovative market solutions in places where government policy and humanitarian aid falter. I was reminded of Acumen Fund’s unique place in not only encouraging creative new business models, but also in impacting legislative and human rights imperatives in meaningful ways. My belief in the need for Acumen Fund’s work (and for smart solutions in sectors like agriculture and nutrition) in countries like India was re-affirmed. It’s heartening to be a part of an organization like this that is working to fill this vital gap.

Lorrayne Ward is starting her second year of an MPP/MBA joint degree at Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School. Prior to graduate school, Lorrayne worked at the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and McKinsey & Company.

For most of us, a mosquito bite is an itchy annoyance – a small price to pay in exchange for warm weather and lazy days outside. But in much of the world, a mosquito bite can be a life-or-death issue. For the hundreds of millions of people living in malaria endemic areas, fighting mosquitoes, and the deadly parasites they carry, is a daily struggle. Controlling malaria isn’t rocket science, and for the price of a sandwich in New York City you can equip a family with an effective set of tools for preventing and treating malaria: a long-lasting insecticide-treated bed net (LLIN) and artemisinin-based combination therapy (ACTs), a drug used for the treatment of malaria. Both of these products only came to market a few years ago, as a result of focused efforts and collaboration by various public and private sector organizations.

Acumen Fund had a significant role to play in scaling up the global production of LLINs, through its investment in A-Z Textile Mills in Tanzania. It helped to broker a technology transfer partnership between chemical giant Sumitomo, who had developed an innovative way to weave durable polyethylene fibers with a time-release insecticide, and A-Z, who transformed itself from a producer of simple bednets to more complex, higher-value LLINs. A-Z is now one of the largest global manufacturers of LLINs, and one of the single biggest employers in Tanzania.

Voila, Acumen Fund’s appetite for malaria investment was born! The A-Z investment was followed by a deal with Bio-Extracts EPZ in Kenya, the only African manufacturer of the active ingredient in ACTs; and DART, a new joint venture between Vestergaard-Frandsen, Richard Allan and the Acumen Fund to develop and market an insecticide-treated wall lining.

But since Acumen’s original loan to A-Z, the malaria space has changed dramatically. Global funding for malaria has increased exponentially, to over a billion dollars per year. Coverage of key methods to prevent and treat malaria has also grown substantially. Challenging these positive developments are looming threats like the parasite’s growing resistance to the active ingredients in LLINs and ACTs, the economic crisis curtailing donor outlays, and climate change making more areas of the world potentially susceptible to malaria.

So, Acumen Fund asked itself what role its “patient capital” approach could play in the marketplace for malaria products and services. That’s where I came in, since I had some background in malaria through my pre-Acumen Fund experiences. “Think big,” said Chief Investment Officer Brian Trelstad when asking me to conduct this market review. “Leave no stone unturned – there have to be innovative opportunities out there that would benefit from our capital and management assistance.”

With those words in mind, I started my analysis. What companies, big and small, are active now in the market? What are the major gaps? How could small and medium enterprises like those that Acumen Fund supports be better represented in this space? What new innovations could change the market? I asked over 30 leading stakeholders in the malaria world these and many other questions. I expected a wide range of responses, but with very few exceptions, I was surprised by the experts’ consensus, and the resulting short list of potential opportunities for Acumen Fund investment.

After presenting my findings to the team, there was nothing patient about moving from proposal to action. The Acumen team has already set about to perform preliminary due diligence on some interesting companies as well as explore ways to leverage our connections in the international policy and funding worlds to raise the profile of several innovative small and medium enterprises.

Personally, it was exciting to see my summer’s worth of work being so enthusiastically embraced and translating into concrete actions. For me, it represented Acumen Fund’s modus operandi at its best – sourcing ideas from an eclectic base, thinking creatively about how to best apply its resources towards resolving an issue of global social importance, and moving swiftly to capitalize on opportunities.  Hopefully, through the actions of Acumen Fund and all the other stakeholders striving in this space, the millions around the world currently suffering from malaria can have the luxury of someday writing off a mosquito bite as just a pesky side effect of an otherwise perfect summer day.

Acumen Fund India is seeking a new Portfolio Manager to support our health work. The PDF version of the job description can be found here: India Portfolio Manager or on the Work with Acumen page.

The India Portfolio Manager will be directly responsible for (1) managing the healthcare portfolio in India, including current investments and the development of future investments in the sector and (2) managing compliance and operations of the Acumen Fund India office. S/he will also be expected to play a significant role globally, helping to build on the existing healthcare expertise in the organization.

Our ideal candidate is not only deeply committed to our mission and business model but equipped with 7 – 10 years of principal investing experience in the healthcare sector.

If you or someone you know is interested in the position, please visit the site to learn more.

Mike McCreless is currently serving as a summer associate on the Portfolio team.  He is a joint-degree student at Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School’s MPA-ID program. He has worked as a consultant for Monitor Company in New York, Madrid, Paris and Morocco, and as a Research Associate for Professor Michael Porter at Harvard Business School, where he wrote case studies and research notes about economic development in Rwanda, foreign aid and other topics.

A couple of years ago, Larry Summers gave a guest lecture at a class I was taking on international development. He delivered a fascinating 20-minute lecture as if reading it from a transcript in his mind’s eye, and then took questions for an hour. I asked him why foreign aid had delivered so much less ‘development,’ by any definition, than expected, and what should we be doing with our time and money instead?

He took a long pause, staring into space, and then said slowly that that was perhaps the most profound question in economics, causing me simultaneously to swell with pride and recoil at my own pretentiousness. He listed several of the standard arguments for aid’s ineffectiveness, but what really stuck with me was his contention that advances in technology, not foreign aid, would do most to eradicate poverty in the long run.

Well, that made sense, but I wasn’t sure what to do about it. It was not as if I had a stockpile of socially valuable technological innovations saved up for just such an occasion. I was a white twenty-something from the American ‘burbs, with no technological expertise and limited experience in Africa, but enough experience with the foreign aid system to give me misgivings about a career with the big multilaterals.

I didn’t have any technological innovations, but I did have ideas about how to make the foreign aid system more effective. Before enrolling in grad school, I spent time in Rwanda, researching economic development and in particular, the efforts of aid agencies on the ground. As I traveled around the country and met its people, I was astonished at the level of deprivation that they endured despite the vast inflows of aid. It appeared that aid had delivered surprisingly little ‘development,’ though of course the counterfactual might have been much worse. Moreover, the academic and popular press was awash with possibilities to improve the management practices of aid agencies. I hoped that better measurement of project outcomes, and alignment of organizational structures and staff incentives with those outcomes, would help donors and recipients alike get more out of the $100 billion spent on aid every year.

I am in a three-year program in which students work in internship programs during the two intervening summers. Last summer, I had the opportunity to test some of these ideas during an internship at a large aid institution. My role was to help design the next version of an internal system to track project outcomes. I worked with project managers to understand how they select projects, manage them over time, and measure their impact. I tried to assess the potential for better management practices at U.S. headquarters to improve results on the ground in Africa.

I also tried to understand the culture of the organization and how I might fit in. I tried to understand managers’ jobs, how they spent their time day-to-day, and more importantly, how they felt about their jobs. What did their work mean to them? Did they feel like they were making a difference? Did they believe that somewhere out there, in some forgotten urban slum or rural village, someone’s life was improved, their burdens eased by the work we did behind our desks in the U.S.?

During these conversations, I was often reminded of a quote from Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis’ memoir of his time on Wall Street during the 1980s: “Goodness was not taken into account on the trading floor. It was neither rewarded nor punished. It just was. Or it wasn’t.” On a trading floor, this is as it should be, but I did not expect it to be as true of aid institutions in 2008 as it was of Salomon Brothers in 1987.

Many of the managers I spoke to care deeply about development, and think critically and often about whether their work actually helps anyone. Others wish they worked at a purely commercial enterprise, where they would not have to be bothered by concerns about social impact. To some, a job in the foreign aid system simply meant a comfortable life in the U.S. and enhanced status in the socio-political elite of their home country. Most staff simply assume that what they do helps people, without really checking to make sure. Their hearts are in the right place, and they have faith in the system to direct their efforts toward socially valuable ends. In fairness, it is extraordinarily difficult to know whether one’s activities in U.S. headquarters actually help anybody on the ground. I was nevertheless taken aback at how little people cared to find out.

I realized that my ideas about reforming management practices at aid agencies were a technocratic solution to a cultural problem. Managerial fixes such as systems to track results and incentive plans aligned with results help on the margins, but do not directly address the fundamental cultural issues that constrain the effectiveness of foreign aid.

For my second summer internship, I focused on smaller organizations that I believed shared my values, and my interest in experimenting with new modes of foreign assistance. To make a long story short, this June I found myself at Acumen Fund. The fourth day of my internship was “World Metrics Day,” declared as such by Acumen Fund and its partners to celebrate the progress they have made in measuring the social impacts of their investments. As we sat down to a World Metrics Day teleconference, Acumen Fund Chief Investment Officer Brian Trelstad turned to me. “World Metrics Day! What better way to inaugurate your first week!” He stared at me expectantly. I wasn’t used to this level of excitement about measuring social impact. I stared dumbly back, trying to figure out if he was joking or not, if I should laugh or nod. He has a wry sense of humor, but he wasn’t joking. The man really cares to know whether what he does actually helps anybody. It was going to be a different kind of summer.

I have spent half of my time working on a deal to use innovative biomass technology to electrify rural off-grid villages in India, and half of my time thinking about how to integrate the many approaches Acumen takes to measuring the social impacts of its investment. The biomass project has vividly demonstrated the potential for innovation to create tremendous social impact. This social impact may be difficult to measure, but Acumen Fund’s investment in impact measurement also demonstrates that an organization that truly wants to measure its impact can find a way to do so.

In the end, Larry Summers was right. My quest for an organization that was serious about high-efficiency social impact led me to an organization that invests in innovations—innovations not only in technology, but also in distribution and delivery of essential products and services to the poor.

On the surface it may seem like Acumen Fund, and venture philanthropy in general, seems to just be the hot new thing these days. They blog, and tweet, and use fancy words like ‘philanthro-capitalism.’ They are undoubtedly in fashion. That’s great, because it gets new people excited about the work they do. But look past all that. Acumen Fund could fall out of fashion tomorrow—no more headlines, no more keynote speeches—and what would be left is a handful of people who actually care whether what they do is valuable. Not to the blogosphere and the editors of The Economist, but to poor people in India, Pakistan, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. That is my experience of Acumen Fund this summer: a small group of people who are in it for the right reasons, a handful of villages in India that have access to clean electricity for the first time (and the prospect of bringing electricity to many more), and all for much less than it would have cost my former employer to accomplish the same. The fashion may fade, but the impact will remain.