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. ( )

An inspiring memoir describing the author's journey from Wall Street to Africa, where she founded the pioneering nonprofit, Acumen. Novogratz relates her experiences working to alleviate poverty and promote social entrepreneurship in some of the world's most challenging environments. A fresh perspective on the power of social change. ( )

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. ( )

The author attempts to apply the feel-good theory of donating clothing on the larger NGO platform. Seeing that her donated blue sweater was being worn by someone in a developing country seemed to give her the naive belief that she can help people with her ideas, without taking into consideration their culture, desires, and motivations. A great lesson is understanding that your way is not necessarily the right way or the only way. ( )

This was not a book I would have chosen to read on my own, but our book group voted to read it so I thought it would be a good stretch. Turned out it wasn't a favorite of many of us but we had a great discussion about it: about the author, the concepts she presents, and about poverty in third world countries. One thing that struck me about this memoir (and was incredibly distracting from the point of the book) was how careless Novogratz was - she put herself in danger time and again while living in Africa: running on the beach alone and being mugged by three men, driving in a car alone with an unknown man out into the desert, having her house broken into and all her clothes and other items stolen and she doesn't prosecute the thief. She climbs an 11,000 ft. volcano in shorts and a t-shirt, she eats street food in several third world countries - it was difficult to take her seriously when she seemed to often put herself at risk. But her intentions were good (to bridge the gap between rich and poor) and the first two thirds of the book were interesting enough as I learned of her strategies to help people develop successful businesses via micro-finance rather than just take handouts. The last third of this book got very bogged down with numbers and statistics and was no longer interesting to me.