April 9, 2009 | Read Time: 2 minutes
NEW BOOKS
The Blue Sweater
by Jacqueline Novogratz
The article of clothing in question is a sweater given to the author, the founder and chief executive of a social-entrepreneurship firm called the Acumen Fund, as a child. When she outgrew it, she donated it to Goodwill and years later, as a young woman helping to make small loans to entrepreneurs in Rwanda, she saw a young boy wearing that same sweater, prompting her belief that the world is interconnected.
After a three-year stint as an investment banker on Wall Street, Ms. Novogratz decided to join a nonprofit organization that sought to help women entrepreneurs and was sent to Kenya, the beginning of a career working on similar projects around the globe.
This memoir recounts the projects Jacqueline Novogratz has led and the people she has met throughout her travels in Africa, India, and Pakistan. After founding a microfinance bank in Rwanda named Duterimbere, in 1987, she visited the country months after the genocide to see the bank’s progress. She tells the story of one of its clients, an HIV-positive woman who lost her husband and three of her four children to the disease, who borrowed $50 to operate a roadside milk stand, and eventually turned that investment into a successful restaurant and catering business.
After directing the Philanthropy Workshop and the Next Generation Leadership program at the Rockefeller Foundation, Ms. Novogratz founded the Acumen Fund in 2001. Its first project was to provide a grant to an eye surgeon for “telemedicine” in India, to allow farmers to have their eyes examined without heavy travel, and in general to connect patients to doctors via computer. Seven years later, it provides thousands of people with eye care.
Writes Ms. Novogratz: “I’ve learned that many of the answers to poverty lie in the space between the market and charity and that what is needed most of all is moral leadership willing to build solutions from the perspectives of poor people themselves rather than imposing grand theories and plans upon them.”
Publisher: Rodale, 733 Third Avenue, 15th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10017-3204; (212) 697-2040; fax (212) 682-2237; http://www.rodale.com; 262 pages; $24.95; ISBN 9-781594-869150.
