Jacqueline Novogratz

The economic gap between the rich and poor has increased in recent decades, yet the access to technology in many ways democratizes the world. Increasingly, many of the rich don’t find much meaning in just earning another dollar. Here, Jacqueline Novogratz shares her tale of receiving a business education but not aspiring to Wall Street. Instead, she went to Africa and saw the potential to introduce capitalistic motivations for the greater cause of human happiness.

Capitalism has gotten a bad name when individuals live for money alone. But Adam Smith originally wrote The Wealth of Nations as a natural account of how commerce actually happens and contributes to human happiness through accruing wealth. Novogratz digs deeply into Smith’s well to describe her life journey. After college, she started companies like microfinance ventures in central Africa to advance women’s well-being there. She returned to the US, but still kept an ideal of combining philanthropy and for-profit business in the same venture. She calls this “social entrepreneurship” and has applied these concepts globally in Africa and south Asia.

Along her path, she also had to reckon with a changed central Africa. Her efforts started with a focus on Rwanda just before the genocide. Then tragedy struck, and friends died. Other friends were jailed for committing atrocities. The entire country changed. She talks about navigating her relationships around this trauma. She seems to feel an uneasy peace about this event in a way that transcends logic. These reflections provide the most interesting human factors of her account.

I myself am not in business, economics, or philanthropy – clearly the main fields of this book. (I write software for medical research instead.) Nonetheless, this book reminds me of a large human search for meaning. Capitalism is just a tool for these ends, for individual happiness and for others’. Although its themes are clearly rooted in an optimism from the the 21st century’s first decade, anyone who wants to unite material benefits with universal human flourishing – in whatever field – can appreciate Novogratz’s account.… (més)

This memoir of Jacquline Novogratz, the founder of Acumen Fund - a non profit organization funding social entrepreneurs all over the world in the effort to mitigate poverty in a sustainable way - is an enlightening read. It narrates the journey of a woman with a will to change the world, who left a high-paying job in the USA to get involved in uplifting the women of African countries; the journey that took her along to India and Pakistan, helping the organizations working with the poorest of poor by investing 'patient capital'. This book provides an insight into the mixing of market and charity, a concept totally alien to traditional thinking.
In spite of having such important contents, this book fails to satisfy in terms of writing as there are a lot of jumps in the narrative and many repetitive thoughts and descriptions.… (més)