Overnight links for December 9th

First up, a new survey finds that Saskatchewan residents think poverty as the biggest world concern. Writer Tim Switzer filed this story that we found at the Saskatoon Star Phoenix. 

The crisis of water scarcity was touched on in an article A. D. McKenzie filed for the Inter Press Service.

Jacqueline Novogratz of the Acumen fund has penned another op-ed piece for the Huffington Post. Novogratz presents a new video from the fund that describes how "patient capital" works.

Finally, The Free Press from Mankato, Minnesota takes a look at the latest poverty statistics for their local area.

eBay founder to invest in more Indian social businesses

A non-profit venture fund set up by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar plans on spending more money in India. Pierre Omidyar and his Omidyar Network invests in companies that provide solutions or products that can improve the lives of the poor.

Similar to the Acumen Fund, Omidyar invests in the companies but doesn't demand a return on the investment. If the investment is successful and the money paid back, the money just gets invested again elsewhere.

From the Wall Street Journal's India Real Time, writer Amol Sharma talks about what Omidyar hopes will come from the investments.

Among the key areas the group plans to target in the future, Mr. Sinha said, are businesses that aim to bring poor people into the banking system, social media enterprises and technologies aimed at making government more transparent. He said the amount Omidyar Network commits will be “driven by opportunities,” but he expects deals worth $100 million to $200 million in five years.

“We’re looking for organizations that are going to have breakthrough impact, and are going to scale and touch millions of lives,” Mr. Sinha told India Real Time.

While in some ways it acts like a venture investor, Omidyar’s funding mechanism is purely philanthropic.

“Basically, we have access to Pierre’s checkbook,” Mr. Sinha said. “We have one source of permanent capital and that’s Pierre’s wealth. He’s very generous.”

That means there’s no time-horizon by which investments need to be made and no venture fund investors demanding a payoff. Profits from any investments—such as the sale of a portfolio company—are re-invested in philanthropic deals.

Mr. Omidyar, the French-born entrepreneur who founded eBay in 1995 and has a net worth estimated at over $5 billion, has become an active philanthropist along with this wife Pam in recent years.

The venture-meets-philanthropy model that Omidyar Network has followed is getting increasingly popular in developing markets. Acumen Fund, which calls itself “a non-profit global venture fund,” has more varied sources of funds than Omidyar’s organization but a similar approach to making investments. It targets sectors such as health, housing, water and energy.

Jacqueline Novogratz on lessons learned outside of the classroom

The Acumen Fund's Jacqueline Novogratz arrived in Africa as a young woman with dreams to change the world. After some success and some failures, she returned to the states to receive more education. But it was lessons learned from her experiences in Africa and her childhood that led her to create the Acumen Fund, a large venture fund that gives capital to start up businesses in Africa and Asia.

From Success Magazine, writer John Ostdick interviews Novogratz on what she learned outside of the classroom.

Her March 2009 book, The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World (Rodale Books), chronicles her passionate journey to the creation of the 8-year-old Acumen Fund, a nonprofit global venture fund using entrepreneurial approaches to solve the problems of global poverty. “As our world becomes increasingly interconnected, we need to find better solutions that will include everyone in today’s opportunities,” she writes. “Monsters will always exist. There’s one inside each of us. But an angel lives there, too. There is no more important agenda than figuring out how to slay one and nurture the other.”

Acumen Fund manages more than $40 million in investments in South Asia and East Africa, all focused on delivering affordable basic services to the poor (her immediate goal is to increase that to $100 million).

Novogratz’s change-the-world passion began early. “I grew up very disciplined, with nuns, a military family of seven, all the rest boys,” she says during a break from a frantic day of meetings in Acumen’s New York offices just before leaving on another far-flung trip. “I was very tough, and hard on myself, and had high expectations for myself.”

The compassion of the West Point, N.Y., nuns who taught her—particularly a first-grade teacher, Sister Mary Theophane, whom Novogratz recalls with special affection—helped hone her lofty determination.

“It was from her that I first heard that ‘to whom much is given, much is expected,’ ” Novogratz says. “I wanted desperately to be one of those kids who delivered. I wanted to commit to do something big.”

In a way, she took her own set of vows in those formative years. She would later embrace the writing of Thoreau and Shaw, extracting from the poets what it meant to live a full life. “When I would read Thoreau talk about people living lives of quiet discontent, I would say, ‘That is not going to be me. I am going to live out loud,’ ” she says.
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Her education and her early efforts in philanthropy, banking and microfi nance would eventually contribute to her innovative Acumen Fund vision. The bottom line, she concluded, is that charity alone cannot end poverty. Rather than handing out grants, Acumen invests in fl edgling companies and organizations that bring critical—and often life-altering—products and services to the world’s poor.

“Early on, it was all about developing the confidence and earning respect to be effective,” she says. “One of my favorite Martin Luther King Jr. lines is: ‘Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.’ When I fi rst went to Africa, I felt this great sense of compassion and was making excuses for people…. Once I let go of the idea of being Mother Superior trying to save the masses and instead found the joy of building systems that really do allow people to change their own lives, then I could be much more myself and challenge people to reach higher. What I learned is people live up and down to the expectations others place on them. That was incredibly liberating to me.”

Jacqueline Novogratz of the Acumen Fund on defining poverty

Jaquelene Novogratz of the Acumen Fund gives her background story

Jaquelene Novogratz was inspired by her father and by Catholic School Nuns to help children. So, after studying economics and working for Chase Bank, she began the Acumen Fund, which helps the lives of the poor through microcredit.

In this New York Times essay, Novogratz explains how her background helped her evolve into microcredit.

Chase trained me in finance and cash flow and how companies work, and I did work in 40 countries. It was a gift from the universe and the perfect beginning of a career.

I loved being a banker, but I felt that banks were missing an opportunity in not extending their services to more low-income people. I decided to leave Chase and move to Rwanda, where I helped build its first microfinance institution. I also helped start a bakery with six Rwandan women. Their stories became the starting point for “The Blue Sweater,” a book I wrote about how to assist developing countries in building organizations that help their citizens.

The key is giving access to affordable services like clean water, adequate health care and energy sources so they can make their own decisions and change their own lives. That’s where dignity starts.

I returned to the United States to attend Stanford for an M.B.A and heard the president of the Rockefeller Foundation give a speech about microfinance. We started talking and got to know each other. I worked for him for a year and helped start several programs.

In 2001, I started the Acumen Fund, a nonprofit global venture fund. We manage more than $40 million in investments in Africa and Asia. We raise charitable funds and invest in and loan money to enterprises that provide services to low-income people. We use any financial returns to invest in other innovative projects to help the poor.

For example, drip irrigation lets farmers raise production on drought-prone fields. In India, we invested in a company that reconfigured the technology for local farmers. To visit one, I flew from Mumbai to Aurangabad, took a three-hour bus ride, then walked a long time on dirt so dry it cracked. Finally I met a man growing lemon trees and eggplant. He was in his canvas house with his wife, who offered us a meal. Halfway through it, he said he wanted to show me something, and we walked to the concrete slab that was the foundation of the house they planned to build. He has dreams for the first time in his life.

Building new leaders in social enterprise

Today we ran across this video from the Acumen Fund on a student workshop to help new leaders in social enterprise.