The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World (34 page)

Liliane and Julien moved to a new house. Julien loved his work with an international NGO as a doctor focused on AIDS. Liliane was about to take a break from her work to focus on family, though she said she would seek consultancies. Because she wasn't as occupied with the office, she had time to cook. She spoiled me with nine different courses of Rwandan food, including fried tilapia and green beans, plantains and rice, meat stew, fried potatoes, and salad.

Together, Liliane and I visited the Genocide Memorial Center in Kigali, along with our young Tutsi taxi driver whose uncle is buried there. We held one another's hands as we moved through the rooms recounting the country's history and displaying photographs of loved ones lost, as well as testimonials from survivors.

Afterward Liliane told me, "I think we will not see another genocide in this country. If we have learned anything, it is the horror that can happen when people don't think for themselves, but instead follow authority blindly. We have to teach our children judgment in our schools and our businesses if we are to thrive truly as a country."

As for Prudence, unable to find a job after the genocide, she had returned to school to earn a law degree. Now she oversees standards at a major coffee producer in Kigali. On my last night in the country, I met her and her husband, Ezekiel. After about 30 minutes of small talk and beers, I asked her what she had learned since I'd last seen her.

"Before everything happened," she said, "my family and I had everything: a big house, two cars, four beautiful children, wealth, status, and even the title of being a parliamentarian. And then we lost everything. I was imprisoned, our things were taken, but most important, two of our children disappeared in the march back from the refugee camps. We never saw them again."

She went on to say that her time in prison was terrible for her, but it also was a time that allowed her to reflect on what was important and to develop a deeper faith inside herself.

"When you have everything," she went on, "you start to think that material things are most important. When you lose them all, at first you think you have lost yourself, as well. But with faith, you begin to see that it is only those things that you build inside-those things that no one can take away from you-that matter. Now we try to live from a place of love. And we understand that you can only have great joy if you also know great pain."

Though their children are both studying abroad, Prudence and Ezekiel will stay in Rwanda. "We can't imagine ourselves as refugees in another country," Ezekiel explained. "This is our home and we will stay here and grow with it."

Duterimbere had invited Prudence, one of the organization's founders, to attend its 20th anniversary celebration.

"I couldn't make it," she said, "because I had to work. It was still early days, and I was proving myself at the coffee company. But I have the certificate proudly displayed in my living room. Those were the best days of my life."

A hopeful little organization built to support women's economic activities 20 years ago has made a difference. The founding members of Duterimbere also helped create PROFEMME and the Women's Network and other enterprises that together advanced the women's agenda in a society that had little official place for them for generations. Hundreds of thousands of people have been touched by the loans made by the women's bank, and some of them have gone on to create real businesses that provided income and a sense of greater purpose to the borrowers and their families.

When I first moved to Rwanda, I could barely find it on a map. Today, Africa is on the front page of newspapers and talked about at family dinner tables across the world. Celebrities travel there, and many want to help, as do young people focused on learning and service. We are connected in ways we could never have imagined.

I will forever be grateful to Duterimbere and to Rwanda for teaching me about possibility, about the power of markets, the need for smart and carefully invested financial assistance, and the constant hope for rebirth. I learned that microenterprise is an important part of the solution, but it is not the only part. I also learned that traditional charity alone can't solve the problems of poverty.

Before we made the blue bakery a business, the women were demoralized, dependent, and still desperately poor. Big flows of aid can create as many incentives for corruption and mismanagement as for change. Markets alone won't solve the problems of poverty. Low-income people are invisible to most entrepreneurs, who don't see them as paying customers. Poor distribution, lack of infrastructure, and corruption all add up to a failure of markets to deliver to the poor what they want and need at prices they can afford.

What is needed going forward is a philosophy based on human dignity, which all of us need and crave. We can end poverty if we start by looking at all human beings as part of a single global community that recognizes that everyone deserves a chance to build a life worth living.

CHAPTER 13

THE EDUCATION OF A
PATIENT CAPITALIST

"In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other. That time is now."

-WANGARI MAATHAI

n the final years of the 20th century, the dot-com boom was in full swing, 20-something-year-old millionaires were being minted on a daily basis, and interest in philanthropy was on the rise. At the end of 1999, I was sitting with the new president of the Rockefeller Foundation, Sir Gordon Conway, in his 22nd-floor office overlooking Manhattan, sharing my frustrations about traditional philanthropy, remarking that it often lacked clear measures and accountability and seemed at times more focused on making donors feel good than on effecting change.

The world needed a new kind of institution, I said, one built on the best lessons and precepts of philanthropy but also utilizing business approaches and concepts. I'd seen the rise of socially oriented companies and felt that deep changes were under way in both business and philanthropy. Leaning back in his chair, he looked at me as I spoke, listening intently, one eyebrow raised in a way that communicated either interest or skepticism, or perhaps a little of each.

I was breathless with excitement, dreaming about a different kind of "fund," one that would amass philanthropic money, have the flexibility to make grants or investments in both nonprofit and for-profit organizations, take a few big bets on enterprises that delivered critical services to the poor, so to ensure low-income communities could actually be part of the solution. We would build more transparency and greater accountability into the work at all levels and treat the poor as customers with a real voice, not as passive recipients of charity.

"How different is it from the work of foundations today?" he asked.

"The biggest difference," I said, "is that we wouldn't simply make grants, but we would invest in entrepreneurs who have vision and the ability to solve local problems with market-driven ideas and approaches. We would hire creative people with the ability to read financial statements and balance sheets, not just budgets. We wouldn't focus on specific `projects,' but instead direct our efforts toward building strong organizations that we would gradually help bring to financial sustainability."

The philanthropic sector was already changing-the very word "philanthropy" felt outdated. The lines between the private and philanthropic sectors were beginning to blur: As more companies integrated a charitable mission into the very way they did their work, more nonprofits would become more businesslike, and more individuals would pursue second careers in giving back. The Rockefeller Foundation had been at the forefront of inventing philanthropy in its early days, and now it had a chance to help reinvent it.

Gordon drew in his breath and thought for a minute, and when he suggested I take a few months to explore the possibility of creating such a venture and do it on the Rockefeller Foundation's dime, I nearly fell out of my chair. This was a gift I hadn't imagined. As in the days when UNICEF had housed me and enabled me to help start Duterimbere, so now would the Rockefeller Foundation give me a powerful running start on a new dream, one that I couldn't yet even fully articulate but believed was badly needed.

The solution lay between the market and the traditional philanthropic model. For 20 years, I had been apprenticing, gathering tools while watching extraordinary individuals like Muhammad Yunus of Grameen Bank, Mary Houghton and Ron Grzywinski of ShoreBank, and Bill Drayton of Ashoka, learning to recognize other entrepreneurs and build networks of people who were capable of bringing about change. Now was the moment to stand on their shoulders and move.

I had been working on several concepts with a small group of committed philanthropists, most of whom had been members of the Philanthropy Workshop, the organization I'd founded at the Rockefeller Foundation. Cate Muther, former vice president of marketing for Cisco Systems, had conceived a technology portal to help change and facilitate philanthropy. To pursue the idea, she held regular meetings with Stuart Davidson, a venture capitalist interested in the role of business in social change; Roberta Katz, former general counsel for Netscape; Tom Reiss of the Kellogg Foundation; and Tae Yoo, who had recently been appointed to lead Cisco's philanthropic work. It was an honor to be a part of this group who gave so much of themselves and were never short of new ideas.

Then an appealing alternative arose. The chief operating officer of a major financial institution approached me about building a philanthropic program for their clients worth at least $100 million. In the era of the dot-com boom, the circle of extremely wealthy people was expanding, and many were looking to do something important with their philanthropy. Here was a chance to help them. Moreover, the salary on the table was seven times what I'd been earning at the Rockefeller Foundation.

I was torn between the freedom to build exactly what I wanted on the one hand and the certainty of access to power and a real level of financial resources on the other. I had no money, no organization, and was facing a world of risk in striking out on my own. Having the backing of a prestigious institution with all the trappings-salary, title, and access-was very appealing. Though I had never made a decision based on income or title before, this was a new level of each.

Though either choice was good, one was truer to myself. Recently, a 71-year-old entrepreneur defined his breed as "the most stubborn and persistent people in the world. Entrepreneurs see possibility, an idea, and won't stop, regardless of the obstacles, until they make it happen. They aren't necessarily the smartest people in the world, but they are the ones who have the guts and the heart to do whatever it takes to make dreams come real." Then he added with a knowing smile, "They aren't always the easiest people to work with, either."

Seeing many of these qualities in myself, I knew I was more suited to trying to build something from a place of freedom and innovation. I thought of Aristotle's reminder not to confuse means with ends: If title and money could be conferred on me, they could also be taken away. I also knew that building a program inside a financial institution would mean dealing with a different set of constraints and challenges, especially in bad times (as it turned out, not even a year later, the dot-com bubble burst and the $100 million circle shrank overnight). Ultimately, I reflected on Goethe's invocation to "make a commitment and the forces of the universe will conspire to make it happen" and chose the uncharted path.

I began to think of what we were launching as a venture capital fund for the poor. We would raise charitable funds, then invest equity, loans, and grants-whatever was needed-in organizations led by visionary entrepreneurs who were delivering to low-income communities services such as safe water, health care, housing, and alternative energy sources. In addition, we would provide them with wide-ranging support on everything from basic business planning, to hiring managers, to helping them connect to markets. We would measure the results of our investment not only in the capital flowing back to the fund, but also-and more importantly-in the investment's social impact. Any money returned would then be reinvested into other enterprises that served the poor.

In the beginning, many people thought we were talking about microfinance, but the organization would be very different. We would not make tiny loans to women, but would invest hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in enterprises that aspired to reach at least a million customers. My passion was using business models to create effective, sustainable systems where government or charity alone had failed poor people. By investing in private innovation, we hoped to understand how best to make essential services accessible to all and to help lead the way to better models for solving public problems.

Raising the money intimidated me at first. We believed we needed both individual and institutional money because it would signify what the future could look like. Stuart, Cate, and Tae each pledged $500,000 of their personal wealth-acts of enormous generosity and commitment to a totally unproven idea, one they helped build and support with additional financing and significant time over the years. Ultimately, the Rockefeller Foundation committed $5 million and the Cisco Foundation, $2 million. This initial funding put us on the map and provided an early stamp of legitimacy, giving us a running start few organizations have-a huge luxury.