Posts Tagged ‘poverty’

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Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Wednesday, April 4th, 2012

In places where government priorities and market imperatives create a world so capricious that to help a neighbor is to risk your ability to feed your family, and sometimes even your own liberty, the idea of the mutually supportive poor community is demolished.  The poor blame one another for the choices of governments and markets, and we who are not poor are ready to blame the poor just as harshly.

It is easy, from a safe distance, to overlook the fact that in under-cities governed by corruption, where exhausted people vie on scant terrain for very little, it is blisteringly hard to be good.  The astonishment is that some people are good, and that many people try to be…

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Thus ends Katherine Boo’s extraordinary book Behind the Beautiful Forevers, an account of the lives of people living in the sprawling Annawadi slum outside Mumbai’s bustling airport, in the shadows of the city’s sparkling luxury hotels.  If you care about poverty and what it means to be human, then put this at the top of your to-do list.

At Acumen, moral imagination is central to all we do.  Indeed, we believe the practice of putting one’s self in another’s shoes is one of the most critical characteristics of the kind of moral leadership needed in our interconnected world.  Yet it is too rarely taught or even considered in our schools, our companies, our governments. Katherine Boo, with great humility, determination, patience – and what other word for it is there but love? – does what so few are able to do when considering poor people.  She writes from a place of clear-eyed acceptance, showing not a trace of romanticism, pity, disdain or any of the other lenses through which we keep low-income people at a distance. Through the stories of real people, we gain a privileged view of the complex realities of people living in slums struggling mightily to survive, often against all odds.

The words of Boo and the inhabitants of Annawadi rushed through me like a river, cracking open thoughts of how hard this work is, my anger at those who demand simple solutions and expect easy returns; yet, at the same time, pushing me more urgently to find voice, to speak truth when it hurts.  For all of this, I am grateful to the author for her courage, persistence, and openness.

At Acumen, we stand with the poor.  Boo’s book helped reinforce my understanding that building companies alone is not enough to solve problems of poverty. Rather, we need to find and support entrepreneurs who are thinking about what it takes to build systems that can truly break the back of poverty.

Making markets work for and with the poor requires serious experimentation and risk-taking.  Management talent is hard to find and often must be developed.  Even when early innovations start to succeed, it is not uncommon to see growing businesses sabotaged for threatening the status quo. We’ve seen our companies targeted with smear campaigns, threats, extortion and even bombings of their physical infrastructure.  Dealing with all of this – and doing it legally – is costly, not just in financial terms but in the most human of terms.

For these reasons, we insist that our early stage debt and equity investments be backed with philanthropy, not with investment dollars.  We hold as sacred the ability to take risks based on whether we believe we can help build sustainable companies that benefit the poor, rather than focusing first on investors.  Once the companies make it through the breach, if you will, and prove the business model, we can help them look for the next level of capital.  Standing with the poor also requires training a corps of talented leaders who understand what it takes to build markets where none have existed. And it requires sharing what we’ve learned – both successes and failures.

Standing with the poor ultimately means deciding to do what is right, not just what is easy. Standing with the poor means walking away from unethical leaders, even when their companies are “succeeding.”  It means sometimes spending outsized resources to help turn around companies beleaguered by sabotage or extortion. It means pulling out of deals when co-investors are known to be unethical in their dealings.  And the list goes on.

If the emerging field of impact investing loses its way, it will be because investors insist on financial returns above all else.  Building healthy markets that serve the poor requires a more expansive set of measures: whether individuals have more choice and opportunity, whether they not only can earn income but have the chance to save and invest it, whether they have affordable, quality healthcare, energy, clean water, safe housing, and education.

We see time and again – and this, too comes up in Behind the Beautiful Forevers – that low-income people are willing to pay for the things they value. And in all of this, the world has unprecedented opportunity to build a more inclusive economy.  It simply won’t happen by virtue of traditional investment alone, even if lower-than-market returns are expected. Instead, it will require a mix of capital – including grants and patient capital – an infusion of talent, and the moral courage to take on rotten systems, first and foremost by showing that a different path is achievable.

Katherine Boo is right.  What is amazing about people living in the worst of the world’s slums is not that they can do bad things, but that they can hold onto dreams, live with integrity and give until they can give no more.  They deserve better than they’ve been given. And while the poor are not asking for hand-outs, it is up to all of us to build a world that at the very least gets rid of the seemingly insurmountable challenges in their way.

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Jacqueline Novogratz is the founder and CEO of Acumen Fund.

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Help Us Build a World Beyond Poverty

Wednesday, December 21st, 2011

Dear Friend of Acumen,

As 2011 comes to a close, I’ve been reflecting on the past year and the many headline stories of financial uncertainty, political uprisings, and natural disasters. Everywhere are signs of growing recognition that the status quo is no longer an option. The world needs to experiment with new ways of renewing and revitalizing both our systems of capitalism and of government. Acumen Fund is one such experiment and we need your support to create even greater impact in our next phase.

I often repeat our major accomplishments: over 86 million people served with basics like safe drinking water, clean energy, agricultural inputs, and healthcare; and over 55,000 jobs created across East Africa and South Asia. But at the end of the day, patient capital investing is a human story. It is about investing ourselves in one another for the long-term, attaching real stakes (which traditional charity often fails to do) and real engagement in poor communities to the goal of long-term social impact, not short-term financial gain. This is what sets Acumen apart – not just what we do, but how we do it.

When you support our work, you support our investments in companies, leaders, and ideas that can change the world. You support efforts to build sustainable companies like GEWP that enable smallholder farmers like Sridhar Chimane, who lives in the village of Jalkina in Maharashtra, India, to take risks and purchase drip irrigation systems. The results Sridhar experienced were beyond his wildest imagination – yields on his tomatoes improved by 20%, his power bills were cut by half, and he consumed far less water in the process – all of which significantly increased his income. Now take Sridhar’s sense of achievement, his ability to improve his living conditions and those of his family, and multiply that by the 330,000 units GEWP has sold. From just one example, you can begin to see why we need new ways of thinking about our giving. This kind of philanthropy allows organizations like Acumen to invest in some of the world’s riskiest ventures – ones that promise results for the poor and a greater sense of dignity for all of us.

To grow to this next level, we need your support. Please join us for the journey and commit to giving a gift this holiday season to help us build a world beyond poverty – one that extends the fundamental assumption that man is created equal to every man, woman, and child on the planet.

With gratitude,

Jacqueline Novogratz
CEO, Acumen Fund

Jacqueline Novogratz is Founder & CEO of Acumen Fund.

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10 Things We’ve Learned #10 – Patient capital investing is built upon a system of values; it is not a series of steps to be followed

Thursday, November 17th, 2011

Acumen Fund is committed to sharing the learnings we have collected over our past 10 years. In this spirit, we have published  a document called “10 Things We’ve Learned About Tackling Global Poverty.” Each week on the Acumen Fund Blog, we will be posting the next lesson in this series of “10 Things,” along with a guest response from a valued member of our community.

10. Patient capital investing is built upon a system of values; it is not a series of steps to be followed.

“This moment in history demands a new kind of leadership”

We’ve spent a decade building a new approach to fighting poverty, and we’ve learned that our most valuable skill is our ability to balance the values we hold dear: generosity and accountability, listening and leading, humility and audacity – all built on a foundation of integrity and respect.  The work we do exists in the spaces in-between, the grey areas where the rules have yet to be written.

Every day we make hard, sometimes excruciating decisions – between profit and impact, efficiency and equality, short-term and long term – in a complex, imperfect world that craves quick, easy answers.  This takes discipline, focus, and sacrifice, along with compassion and empathy.  Effecting real change, in other words, is hard work. It requires nothing more and nothing less than the art of leadership.

Indeed Acumen Fund’s greatest legacy may someday be the leaders we’ve had the honor to work with and support – our team, our investees, our Fellows, and our global community.   This moment in history, filled with so much opportunity and so much distance between us, demands a new kind of leadership, one that starts by understanding problems from others’ perspective, one that begins with listening but is not afraid to take a firm, moral position.

In ten years of doing this work, we have learned that none of us has all the answers, and that all of us are needed to find them.  Our opportunity today is to deepen the questions we ask; to be audacious in our aspirations but humble in the way we walk through the world; and to work together to find solutions that create a world where the full dignity of each and every person can be expressed.

If not us, then who?  If not now, then when?

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Uzodinma Iweala Responds to Acumen Fund’s Lesson #3: Poverty is a description of someone’s economic situation; it does not describe who someone is

Thursday, September 29th, 2011

Acumen Fund is committed to sharing the learnings we have collected over our past 10 years. In this spirit, we have published  a document called “10 Things We’ve Learned About Tackling Global Poverty.” Each week on the Acumen Fund Blog, we will be posting the next lesson in this series of “10 Things,” along with a guest response from a valued member of our community.

3. Poverty is a description of someone’s economic situation; it does not describe who someone is

In a world where value as a human is all too often associated with the value of the stuff one owns, the person who has less is often considered less of a human being.  Poverty is considered the physical manifestation of some horrendous character flaw. We have so internalized this way of thinking that our descriptions of places in this world considered less materially wealthy automatically resort to standard images that act as shorthand for whole peoples. There is the brown skinned child wallowing in the dust, swarmed by flies. There is the brown skinned woman with a sadness in her sagging eyes and cheeks her mouth half open in lament or hunger. There is the brown skinned man with distant eyes, his body covered in the sweat of his sickness or the futility of his toil. Poverty as part of person is often depicted as inevitable and as such romanticized. It breeds simplistic images and descriptions that allow the haves to define themselves in opposition to the have-nots. That I have is a result of who I am. That you do not is a result of who you are. That is all. The barriers however much we attempt to break them remain unbroken for the simple fact that such a stance does not allow for genuine communication. Those we consider poor are not allowed, beyond their representations to speak, and speak their humanity. And yet as a security guard who works at the gates of the housing development where I live in Abuja said to me one evening, “Even if you have a house with ten thousand rooms, you can only sleep in one bed like I must also sleep in one bed. I can bleed like you bleed. I can speak like you speak.”

Dignity is not bestowed as a gift. It is an expression of force. We are scared by its insistence and as such try to mute its intensity.

That I – who have not known poverty in my life – am writing about poverty is perhaps one of the great absurdities of our century. As a writer who is interested in representations of poverty, I can use my eyes, my pen to try and influence the way that we speak about the global poor, the way that we treat them in our media, in our minds. But this is not enough.

I would love to say that poverty does not describe who someone is, but the truth of the matter is that until we step back and let the “posessionless” speak in unmediated terms, it does.

Uzodinma Iweala is a writer from Washington DC and Nigeria. He is the author of Beasts of No Nation.

Click here for the full “10 Things We’ve Learned About Tackling Global Poverty.”

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10 Things We’ve Learned: #3 – Poverty is a description of someone’s economic situation; it does not describe who someone is

Thursday, September 29th, 2011

Acumen Fund is committed to sharing the learnings we have collected over our past 10 years. In this spirit, we have published  a document called “10 Things We’ve Learned About Tackling Global Poverty.” Each week on the Acumen Fund Blog, we will be posting the next lesson in this series of “10 Things,” along with a guest response from a valued member of our community.

3. Poverty is a description of someone’s economic situation; it does not describe who someone is.

“We focus on the customer not as someone with a series of problems to be solved, but as a full human being.”

Low-income people face a different set of constraints because of their economic situation, but they make decisions, like everyone, that are based on status and beauty and avoidance of risk, and not just “what’s good for them.”

We know that small-scale farmers are risk averse for very good reasons: every season they must risk everything they own to scratch out a barely sustainable wage (if they are lucky).   We have seen that price matters, but sometimes charging too little – even in very low-income communities – can signal poor quality.  We have watched wealthy people pretend they are poorer than they are to save money, and seen poor people pay more to be seen as wealthier, to save face, to bring extra care to their mother or child.  We have seen that people will pay for convenience – to have safe water delivered – but they will not always pay for maintenance of something that belongs to the community.

All of this we have learned because we focus on the customer not as someone with a series of problems to be solved, but, every day and always, as a full human being.

Click here for a response post on Lesson #3 from Uzodinma Iweala and click here for the full “10 Things We’ve Learned About Tackling Global Poverty.”

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