Jacqueline Novogratz

Founder and CEO of the Acumen Fund and Author of The Blue Sweater

  • Jacqueline Novogratz Keynote Speaker Fee Fee range is for U.S. events, depending on location and organization type

    Please Inquire

  • Languages Spoken

    English

  • Travels From

    New York, USA

  • Jacqueline Novogratz Keynote Speaker Fee Fee range is for U.S. events, depending on location and organization type

    Please Inquire

  • Languages Spoken

    English

  • Travels From

    New York, USA

Suggested Keynote Speaker Programs

The Blue Sweater

Jacqueline Novogratz’s memoir, The Blue Sweater, tells the inspiring story of a woman who left a career in international banking to tackle global poverty. By sharing her experiences in Africa and around the world, she teaches audiences how traditional charity ...

Jacqueline Novogratz’s memoir, The Blue Sweater, tells the inspiring story of a woman who left a career in international banking to tackle global poverty. By sharing her experiences in Africa and around the world, she teaches audiences how traditional charity often fails and how a new form of philanthropic investing called “patient capital” can help make people self-sufficient. Novogratz challenges audiences to grant dignity to the poor and to rethink their engagement with the world.

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Patient Capital for an Impatient World

Jacqueline Novogratz started her career in international banking and has since worked across Asia and Africa finding new ways to use business as a tool to create a world beyond poverty. In 2001 she founded Acumen Fund, a nonprofit global venture capital fund that invests ...

Jacqueline Novogratz started her career in international banking and has since worked across Asia and Africa finding new ways to use business as a tool to create a world beyond poverty. In 2001 she founded Acumen Fund, a nonprofit global venture capital fund that invests patient capital — loans or equity instead of grants — in social enterprises that provide critical goods and services to low-income people. Rather than treat the poor as passive recipients of charity, Jacqueline sees them as active participants with the dignity to make choices for themselves. Acumen has since grown to invest $73 million in 65 enterprises that have delivered affordable healthcare, safe housing, clean water, sustainable energy, and agricultural inputs to more than 86 million low-income individuals. Jacqueline shares with audiences several examples from Acumen Fund’s portfolio of investments and the lessons they have learned about how markets can act as a listening device for the needs of the poor.

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Entrepreneurial Approaches to the Challenges of Poverty

What does it mean to be a “patient capitalist”? For Jacqueline Novogratz, it means using an entrepreneurial approach in the fight against global poverty. While traditional development aid can meet immediate needs, Novogratz believes that long-term change requires ...

What does it mean to be a “patient capitalist”? For Jacqueline Novogratz, it means using an entrepreneurial approach in the fight against global poverty. While traditional development aid can meet immediate needs, Novogratz believes that long-term change requires empowering local communities to solve their own problems. Charitable dollars eventually run out, but market-based approaches can continue to create jobs and economic growth over the long term. As founder and CEO of the Acumen Fund, Novogratz has invested over $62 million in 60 companies that have provided 45 million low-income individuals with critical goods and services in the developing world. Acumen Fund’s portfolio companies include everything from an operator of low-cost maternity hospitals to a manufacturer of anti-malarial bed nets.

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About Keynote Speaker Jacqueline Novogratz

Jacqueline Novogratz’s Key Accomplishment Include…

Jacqueline Novogratz is the founder and CEO of the Acumen Fund, a non-profit global venture fund that uses entrepreneurial approaches to solve the problems of global poverty. Proving that with large amounts of business acumen and small amounts of philanthropic capital, thriving enterprises to support the poor can achieve and succeed, Acumen’s innovative, market-oriented approach has helped deliver affordable and critical goods and services around the world. Novogratz is the author of the best-selling memoir, The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World, which documents her life in philanthropy.

For her work with Acumen, Novogratz was named to Forbes magazine’s inaugural “Impact 30” list of top social entrepreneurs, and she was named a TIME magazine “Responsibility Pioneer” for her work in changing the world for the better. The Daily Beast named her one of the “25 Smartest People of the Decade” and Foreign Policy recognized her as one of the world’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers.” In 2009, she was honored with the CASE Leadership in Social Entrepreneurship Award, and has been named an Aspen Institute Henry Crown Fellow and a Synergos Institute Senior Fellow.

A longtime philanthropist, Jacqueline Novogratz is also the founder of The Philanthropy Workshop and The Next Generation Leadership programs at the Rockefeller Institute, as well as Duterimbere, a micro-finance institute in Rwanda.

Sharing her quest to understand poverty and challenging listeners to rethink their engagement with the world, Novogratz is a powerful, inspirational voice for global change.

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