Jacqueline Novogratz on her book Manifesto For A Moral Revolution and creating equal opportunities

Virgin Radio

16 Jun 2021, 10:35

Entrepreneur and author Jacqueline Novogratz joined the Chris Evans Breakfast Show with Sky to talk about her humble American upbringing, her vision of a world based on dignity and her non-profit global venture capital fund Acumen.

The Founder and CEO told Chris: “I grew up as the eldest of seven in a military immigrant Catholic family in the United States and I'd say we were a rambunctious group of cowboys in a small house that all had to somehow bust out in one way or another. We're still very close, we all live in New York and we’re more tribe than anything else. I guess you could call us a group of overachievers..."

What were the ingredients that helped create her and her superhuman siblings? She said: "A lot of myth, a lot of ritual, a lot of focus on showing up for each other, showing up for the world, discipline and maybe not having a lot of money but having a lot of love is a great gift. 

“My father was in Vietnam three different times so it was my mum and the the brood, but it was probably driven more by expectations and values… 

“We had to get good grades, we had to help our brothers and sisters, we had to show up for each other. 

“She would say things to us like I'll always love you, but I don't really like you right now and pieces that stayed with us that I think we could see more of today."

On falling into her career in banking and quitting Wall Street, she explained: “I wanted to understand the politics and the economics of other countries as well.

“I tended to be one of the more curious one and so there was one particular time when I was looking at Swiss banks asking the “dumb” questions and it turned out I was right…

“I learnt overnight that you can be the same person one day for another and have a very different reputation at the same time. I also saw that low income people were completely excluded from the banks and I was really Interested in fairness.

"I saw that low income people had no place in the banks and I saw the vibrancy of people in Brazil and other nations in which I had operated in.

"So I went to my boss and suggested maybe if we lent to people inside the country who were low income but hard working that the bank would get their money back, the countries might develop better than our approach which was often ending up in millions and millions of dollars of write offs.

“If Wall Street taught me that there's a real power to markets, markets also overlook and exploit the poor too. Then I went to Rwanda, I helped a small group of women start the first microfinance bank.

"I saw that if you build people's capabilities they could really access and work with the market but I also saw that charity government aid creates dependency and concluded before starting Acumen that the opposite of poverty is not wealth, it's dignity and that what we needed to do was build systems that allow people to solve their own problems. 

“That's when Acumen was born 20 years ago. It was this idea that we could take charitable funds and invest in entrepreneurs that were trying to solve problems of poverty like health education, agriculture, energy in ways that allowed poor people to access things in ways they could afford.”