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Jacqueline Novogratz
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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 poverty. Acumen Fund aims to create a world beyond poverty by investing in social enterprises, emerging leaders, and breakthrough ideas. Under Jacqueline’s leadership, Acumen Fund has invested more than $80 million in 70 companies in South Asia and Africa, all focused on delivering affordable healthcare, water, housing and energy to the poor. These companies have created and supported more than 57,000 jobs, leveraged an additional $360 million, and reached over 90 million lives. In December 2011, Acumen Fund and Jacqueline were on the cover of Forbes magazine as part of their feature on social innovation. Prior to Acumen Fund, Jacqueline founded and directed The Philanthropy Workshop and The Next Generation Leadership programs at the Rockefeller Foundation. She also founded Duterimbere, a micro-finance institution in Rwanda. She began her career in international banking with Chase Manhattan Bank.
Jacqueline currently sits on the advisory boards of MIT’s Legatum Center and the Harvard Business School Social Enterprise Initiative. She serves on the Aspen Institute Board of Trustees and the board of IDEO.org, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council for Social Innovation. She was also appointed by Secretary Clinton to the Department of State’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board.
She has been featured in Foreign Policy’s list of Top 100 Global Thinkers and The Daily Beast’s 25 Smartest People of the Decade. Jacqueline is a frequent speaker at forums including the Clinton Global Initiative, TED, and the Aspen Ideas Festival. Her best-selling memoir The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World chronicles her quest to understand poverty and challenges readers to grant dignity to the poor and to rethink their engagement with the world.

She has an MBA from Stanford and a BA in Economics/International Relations from the University of Virginia. She has received honorary doctorates from the University of Notre Dame, Wofford College, Gettysburg College, and Fordham University as well the Freedom From Want Award from the Roosevelt Institute in 2011.

For more information on Acumen Fund, please visit www.acumenfund.org.


Photo: ©Joyce Ravid

Blog Entries by Jacqueline Novogratz

Dignity, Not Dependence While Living Under $1 a Day

(5) Comments | Posted February 18, 2013 | 10:32 PM

Her name is Teresia and she is full of life. She hails from Central Kenya, an area rich in agriculture where many still scratch out a living from the land itself. Nearly. Teresia, her daughter and her grandson together live on about $1 a day, earned from informal farm work....

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What Are You Doing When You Feel Most Beautiful?

(9) Comments | Posted November 15, 2012 | 11:23 AM

I was recently asked by the New York Times what questions I pose when I interview job candidates. A favorite of mine is "What are you doing when you feel most beautiful?" The reporter printed it, and I received dozens of responses to the question from people around...

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Roshan Tara Lights the World

(1) Comments | Posted October 26, 2012 | 4:20 PM

On a trip across India with Acumen advisors earlier this month, we take a 13-hour overnight train from Delhi to Gorakhpur in the state of Uttar Pradesh, then drive 2 hours to Kushinagar, the revered place where the Buddha took his last breaths. After a short break, we...

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Thinking About Values in Tension

(0) Comments | Posted August 1, 2012 | 10:06 AM

In David Brooks' July 25th column, he discusses the power of holding contradictory tensions, a power that underscores what makes the Olympics so vital and essential in uniting us as a single world while also celebrating individuals and nations. He goes onto say that all enduring institutions --...

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What It Means to Really Stand for the Poor

(115) Comments | Posted April 5, 2012 | 5:29 PM

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...

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Taking the Next Step in Pakistan

(3) Comments | Posted August 1, 2011 | 11:45 AM

LAHORE, PAKISTAN

This morning, Lahore is hot and sunny. Former Acumen Fund Fellow Jawad Aslam meets us in our guesthouse lobby and we drive through the city, passing Lahore's beautiful fort and mosque, admiring the mix of cars and donkey carts, of morning life, though traffic is easier before nine...

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Winter 2011: A Growing Sense Of Urgency

(0) Comments | Posted February 16, 2011 | 7:19 PM

The year 2011 has many of us around the world trying to catch our breath and make sense of all that is happening at home and elsewhere. Think about the Middle East and North Africa! Egypt has unleashed a global recognition that change is possible -- and people want to...

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Are You Ready to Change the World?

(4) Comments | Posted December 6, 2010 | 1:14 PM

People are searching for better uses of their charity. After nine years, I feel most strongly than ever that patient capital is a powerful way to build sustainable enterprises that can bring critical services like clean water, health care, housing and energy to low-income people in ways that they can...

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Humanity Amidst the Horror in Pakistan

(26) Comments | Posted September 14, 2010 | 12:47 AM

When TED's Chris Anderson and I returned last week from our visit to Pakistan's flood zones, we couldn't get out of our heads the faces of the people we'd seen. They comprised the true treasure of Pakistan, the unlimited potential of what it means to be human, stuck...

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Is There a Better Refugee Camp Design?

(14) Comments | Posted September 6, 2010 | 12:04 PM

Five days ago, the great river Indus continued its rush to the sea and flooded the plains of Thatta and Sujawal, towns located about 90 minutes outside of Karachi. Dr. Rashid Bhajwa hosted my husband, Chris Anderson, and me to visit the camps his organization is supporting there. Dr....

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Pakistan Needs More Servant Leadership

(8) Comments | Posted September 3, 2010 | 8:44 PM

I'm in the office of Dr. Sono, one of Pakistan's most extraordinary social entrepreneurs. Born a Hindu Dalit or "untouchable," he has worked for his country since his youth and emerged as one of the most important grassroots leaders in Sindh. He runs the Sindh Rural Support Organization, a nonprofit...

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Dispatches From Pakistan

(63) Comments | Posted September 2, 2010 | 8:33 PM

2010-09-02-imran.jpg
Imran


At a camp for flood victims in Rhojan, Pakistan, we meet a man named Humayan who is standing beneath his USAID-issued plastic tarpaulin with 16 family members on a 100-plus degree morning. He tells us he is a tractor driver...

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Time to Give: Pakistan Needs the World's Help

(23) Comments | Posted August 24, 2010 | 3:20 PM

My friends in Pakistan are sending me notes describing the almost unimaginable devastation wrought by weeks of flooding that have left an area the size of Austria, Belgium and Switzerland combined under water, 20 million people homeless, killed more than 1,500 individuals, and destroyed more than a $1 billion in...
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The Story of Ifra

(5) Comments | Posted July 6, 2010 | 3:19 PM

Her husband left her to marry a second wife. Ifra was still young then, married to a man her parents had selected for her; happy with their three children. But the husband thought she'd grown old. He took another wife, moved out of their flat and ceased all financial support....
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Model Community Inspires Hope in a Divided Pakistan

(4) Comments | Posted June 22, 2010 | 6:48 PM

It is always emotional for me to visit Khuda ki-basti 4 (KKB-4), the housing development built by Saiban, an Acumen Fund investment, outside Lahore, Pakistan. I remember the first year when it was impossible to get the land registered because Jawad Aslam (KKB-4's manager and former Acumen Fellow)...

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The Importance of Remembering Where You Come From

(1) Comments | Posted June 11, 2010 | 9:20 PM

I'm flying from Islamabad to Lahore, Pakistan. My seatmate is a little girl, about 10 years old, dressed in a fuchsia top and matching leggings with a very hip belt around the waist. Her tiny wrist is circled with a red flowered watch and she wears dainty earrings. She is...

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Could We Live In A World Without Predators?

(19) Comments | Posted April 7, 2010 | 12:47 PM

I'm in the Galapagos Islands with TED to celebrate Sylvia Earle's TED prize focused on saving the oceans . This morning, I took a walk to the ocean's edge in the pouring rain, stopping frequently to marvel at the beauty of this most exquisitely beautiful place. The bright...
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Despite Living Through Genocide, One Can Still Seek Out The Goodness In People

(2) Comments | Posted March 24, 2010 | 12:51 PM

A friend from Rwanda visited me on Friday. I first met her in the country's capital, Kigali, in 1996, two years after the genocide. She was working at UNICEF then, and though we had just met, she helped me track down the people I had known when I and a...
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Dignity Is More Important Than Wealth -- A Universal Truth

(3) Comments | Posted March 19, 2010 | 3:29 PM

I meet Maryam Bibi, one of Pakistan's true heroes, in our office. Maryam is known among those circles of women who fight against all odds in the most challenged communities, sacrificing and risking everything at times, all because they have a vision of what could be. Today, she is wearing...

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The Blue Sweater Challenge: Inspiring Social Change in Kenya

(0) Comments | Posted March 10, 2010 | 1:41 PM

Last week, I received an honorary degree from Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina in honor of Sandor Teszler, an extraordinary Hungarian who fled the Nazis after losing most of his family and settling in Spartanburg, where he built one of the first fully integrated textile factories in the region....

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