Jacqueline Novogratz's Acumen Fund Means Good Business for Poor People

Jacqueline Novogratz, wearing yellow, the founder and CEO of the Acumen Fund, on a visit to India. The firm has helped 40 companies in four countries, Pakistan, India, Kenya and Tanzania, and is now looking to Egypt. Susan Meiselas / Magnum PhotosJacqueline Novogratz, the American founder and CEO of the Acumen Fund, has involved herself in another form of banking.

A former Chase executive and more recently founder and director ot the Philanthropy Workshop and the Next Generation Leadership Program at the Rockefeller Foundation,  Novogratz takes an entrepreneurial, as well as a socially aware, approach to fighting global poverty.

“I want to change the way the world sees poor people and the way we confront the issue of poverty,” Novogratz says on a recent visit to the UAE. “I wanted to create something that honoured people’s ability to work and their creativity. via.” The National

The Acumen Fund has invested US$40 million (Dh147 million) in 40 companies in four countries: Pakistan, India, Kenya and Tanzania. She was recently in Dubai, expressing an interest to invest in Egypt.

Novogratz brings a pragmatic approach to social investment that reflects a new tone, one looking at the probability for long-term results in the project.

In 2004 her fund invested US$600,000 (Dh2.2 million) in a water distribution company in India, WaterHealth International. Rather than giving money to dig wells that probably would be broken in a couple years, her focus was to building a water-provider company, combining local expertise with her fund’s business acumen and mooney.

Five years later, the water purification company that Acumen helped to reach reached one million people in India with safe, affordable water, at a cost of just six cents for the water needs of a family of five for two days. “It is now the largest decentralised water distribution company in India,” says Novogratz. The company aims to grow from 150 water systems to 2,000. Other small enterprises have sprung up around the company, such as water delivery men. via The National Investor in People