Acumen News

• CEO Jacqueline Novogratz was interviewed recently for the NPR program Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett. Check out the show’s website for a podcast and lots of supplementary material.
• In a special section on business and food security, the Financial Times featured two Acumen Fund investments: drip irrigation company GEWP here and nutrition company Insta here. Similarly, the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) includes an interview with Acumen Fund’s Ajay Nair in its latest newsletter.
• Talent Manager Blair Miller was recently interviewed on Dubai radio about the Fellows program.
• An Outlook Business article profiles GEWP, PVRI and other for-profit businesses serving our target market in India.
• There’s still time to order your Book Club in a Box! Get yours now and share The Blue Sweater with others.

Change has been on the American agenda since President Obama took office and it was definitely in the air as the State Department opened its doors to innovators in foreign affairs at Ted@State last week. This was the inaugural event for the Global Partnership Initiative, established by Secretary Clinton in April to foster public-private partnerships between businesses, nongovernmental organizations, foundations, universities and faith communities in order to better achieve its diplomatic objectives.

TED began in 1984 as a conference to bring together leaders in Technology, Entertainment and Design. Since then, it has grown and become a forum for visionaries and innovators, thinkers and doers, to share “ideas worth spreading.” The challenge is to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes and the results have been nothing short of inspirational.

Speakers at the event included social-media analyst Clay Shirky; futurist Stewart Brand; economist Paul Collier; data visionary Hans Rosling; and our own Jacqueline Novogratz, CEO and Founder of Acumen Fund.

This is a thrilling moment for Acumen Fund and for all those working to support social enterprise. It means we are on the Administration’s radar and it means there is an acknowledgement that the traditional top-down approach to aid needs to be rethought.

Jacqueline argued that neither markets nor aid alone will bring an end to global poverty. Instead, she told of the successes created by patient capital and explained how it can provide dignity and hope to the world’s poorest.

“The idea of Patient Capital takes the best of the markets as well as philanthropy and aid. Patient Capital is money invested in entrepreneurs building companies and organizations that solve tough problems like healthcare, water, housing, alternative energy. Expectations for financial returns are lower than market rates. Expectations for social impact are very high.”

In a bold move, she proposed a Global Innovation Fund to invest in local entrepreneurs and civil society leaders. This may have been an outrageous proposal a few years ago. But as the aid debate shifts and as policy officials open their doors, change is in the air and this doesn’t seem so unrealistic.

She ended with a sense of urgency and of hope.

“Now is the moment for all of us to move forward with a spirit of faith, of generosity, of integrity, of perseverance. For it is these qualities for which men and women have always been honored and there is so much to gain.”

Stay tuned for a link to Jacqueline’s Ted@State Talk when made available. In fact, if you haven’t visited the site, do so now. You won’t regret it!

As 2008 screams to a close (I for one cannot believe it’s already December), there seem to be more and more articles about small, growing businesses serving base of the pyramid markets. I think it’s a testament to our movement that the articles are not only growing in number, but in depth. More often than not, journalists are looking to explore how organizations like Acumen Fund are building transformative businesses to solve the problems of poverty by exploring sectors, metrics, systems, lessons and successes.

In the last few weeks alone, there has been some great press coverage. In case you’re not monitoring Google News for every mention of Acumen Fund (and if you are, well, I guess we love you even more!), here are a few highlights:

Power to the People, Financial Times: FT’s Sarah Murray explores how companies, multilateral institutions and development groups are working to deliver power to the world’s poorest communities - including Acumen Fund.

Thinking Big — and Small, Forbes: Ellen Grasso from Forbes’ Executive Woman series profiles Acumen Fund CEO Jacqueline Novogratz.

Social Enterprise Honor Roll, Fast Company: Anne C. Lee at FC looks at our portfolio metrics tracking system, re-named Pulse (as in taking the pulse of an investment to get an idea of its health).

Let’s Share, Stanford Social Innovation Review: Jennifer Roberts at SSIR (one of my favorite, journals) also profiles the Pulse system (formerly known as Portfolio Data Management System or PDMS) in its What’s Next section.

Business Defeats Poverty, New York Times: Nicholas Kristof’s On the Ground blog takes on the idea that business can defeat poverty; Kristof suggests he’s going to focus more on this idea in 2009.

Let’s hope Kristof - and these other fine journalists - continue the trend in 2009. But the burden is also on us at Acumen Fund and our friends in the same space (members of ANDE, for example) to keep pushing the envelope and generating results that merit press coverage.

We’ve previously mentioned our Portfolio Database Management System (PDMS), the tool we are developing (with the help of many) to aggregate and evaluate data about social enterprises. Yesterday was a big day for PDMS: the social metrics platform was announced yesterday at the Clinton Global Initiative, and articles about it appeared in both BusinessWeek and The New York Times.

Also announced at the Clinton Global Initiative was the launch of the ANDE network, which Brian blogged about here. The PDMS is currently being tested by a number of beta users, and we anticipate launching officially at the beginning of 2009. We’d love to launch with a name better than the bland PDMS acronym — any suggestions?