The Blue Sweater by Jacqueline Novogratz

Subtitled: Bridging the Gap between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World.

Jacqueline was educated and then worked in the world of high finance but soon began to realize how empty that world was for her. She worked for Chase Bank and would fly "around the world and review the quality of the bank's loans, especially in troubled economies." It was while she was working in Brazil that she knew she wanted to do something with her life that had more meaning after she was admonished by a hotel manager while helping (in a small way) a 6-year-old street kid in Rio. She began seriously thinking about the disparity between rich and very poor and how she might help.

She found another job and was sent to West Africa, something of an idealist, and she learned that helping the poor and making changes was much harder than she would have thought. Some of the local women resented her. She was now a minority in a foreign culture, no longer a privileged American, and she was in a country where her Western ideas and ways of thinking did not serve her. She then moved to Rwanda, made friends and began to understand how to stand back, observe, slowly assimilate and be accepted. She left that country before the mayhem and murder of a million people, but made several trips back to Rwanda over the years, trying to understand how her friends coped after the unspeakable horrors they lived through..the friends who survived. She slowly learned many lessons, not always quickly. But over the years, she became what she calls a "patient capitalist" and eventually founded The Acumen Fund which helps poor people finance businesses that benefit the larger communities in which they live. The Fund HELPS with financing; does not just give money. It researches, seeks out and then enables people who will be able to sustain businesses that help the very poor in their respective countries. The return on an investment in the Acumen Fund is sometimes just change in the quality of peoples' lives, especially in the early stages of the projects. Her philosophy is similar to the concepts of microfinance or microenterprise in which small amounts of money are lent to the very poor. This empowers women especially as they begin to understand how even a minuscule amount of money can help them out of poverty, can help them make a better life for their children and their communities. The Acumen Fund has worked mostly in Pakistan, Africa and India. This is not pure philanthropy; there is accountability attached to the monies that are dispersed.

Many western donors give and have given generously but have no idea about other cultures. They see desperate needs and think money is the way to fix that lack. And often it does. But, the issues are usually so much more complicated, because different cultures live in ways we Americans cannot imagine. For millions on this planet, luxury is to be able to live in a 500 square foot home, have a quality bed net for malaria prevention and have access to safe water. But bed nets wear out or tear and need replacement, or need to be dipped in insect-repellant solutions periodically; they have to be used consistently; the processes of providing safe water means understanding and maintaining the technology of water systems and the dispensing of the water, and this is also true for the implementation and delivery of water for crops and the maintenance of those delivery systems; health issues need to be explained in ways other cultures can comprehend, not in the ways we have learned them. Giving money is a short-term solution; providing access to money but with accountability and the expectation of payback with interest is a long-term solution. It has worked. There are 6 billion of us living on earth. People like Jacqueline, Bill and Melinda Gates, Muhammad Yunus and many, many others are changing the way the way those who have can most benefit those who have not.

This work and this book is inspiring and certainly can inform one's way of thinking about the global community and each individual who is a member, be he rich or poor.

The title has little to do with the content of this book but the author does explain the significance of it almost immediately, and it is a nice little vignette.