Novogratz, Jacqueline
Founder and CEO, Acumen Fund
Author, The Blue Sweater
Jacqueline Novogratz
Founder and CEO, Acumen Fund
Author, The Blue Sweater
Jacqueline Novogratz is the founder and CEO of Acumen Fund, a non-profit global venture fund that uses entrepreneurial approaches to solve the problems of global poverty. Her recently published memoir, The Blue Sweater, tells the inspiring story of a woman who left a career in international banking to spend her life on a quest to understand global poverty and find powerful new ways of tackling it. In ways, both hilarious and heartbreaking, Jacqueline how traditional charity often fails, but how a new form of philanthropic investing called "patient capital" can help make people self-sufficient and change millions of lives. More than just an autobiography or a how-to guide to tackling poverty, this book challenges us to grant dignity to
the poor and to rethink our engagement with the world.
The book chronicles Jacqueline’s experience in Africa and elsewhere that proved to be the starting point for a career focused on radically changing the way the problems of the developing world are approached. Along the way she founded and directed The Philanthropy Workshop and The Next Generation Leadership program at the Rockefeller Foundation, and Duterimbere, the first micro-finance institution for women in Rwanda. In 2001 Jacqueline founded Acumen Fund, which invests in transformative businesses that deliver affordable, critical goods and services – like health, water, housing and energy – to the poor through innovative, market-oriented approaches. A global leader, Jacqueline has addressed the World Economic Forum, the Clinton Global Initiative and TED about Acumen’s entrepreneurial approach to global poverty.
The Blue Sweater, which will be featured by Barnes & Noble from May through July as part of the Discover Great New Writers program, posits that rather than seeing the world divided between different civilizations or classes, our collective future rests on embracing a vision of a single world in which we are all connected. Markets play a role in this vision, as do public policy and philanthropy.
Nick Kristoff on his blog said of the book: “It’s a terrific and sober-minded look at the
complexities of doing good. She acknowledges that helping people is much harder than it looks, and that donors need to do more listening and less instructing – yet at the end of the day, she believes there are things we can do that really do make a powerful difference to the world’s neediest.”