We are a connected world said Jacqueline as she described the story of her blue sweater, also the title of her recently published book. Once discarded by her at Goodwill, it turned up 25 years later in Rwanda where she found it on a boy in the countryside.
Speaking at the Legatum Center’s Lecture series at MIT, she described the innovative work of Acumen fund and how it helps build social solutions through its venture philanthropy.
She prefaced her talk by some of her observations from her work helping to build enterprises around the world that she undertook since her time in Rwanda.
- Dignity is more important than wealth for the human spirit.
- Traditional models of charity won’t solve problems of poverty.
- Markets can’t solve poverty. 100 Million people went back into poverty last year and that is what happens when you only rely on market forces to solve these problems.
- What is needed is patient capital that will address these problems