Jacqueline Novogratz: Investing in Africa’s Own Solutions

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k_XH-ajLo0
Who is she? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacqueline_Novogratz
In her words: “The only way to end poverty and make it history is to build viable systems on the ground that deliver critical and affordable goods and services to the poor in ways that are financially sustainable and scalable.”

In my words:
Her lifework is in building businesses “on the ground,” and that fact dictates the talk’s strengths and weaknesses. Her kind of detail-rich, fable-like stories are fascinating, memorable and spread like wildfire. They tug on our heart strings and touch that which makes us human. Problems the size of Africa’s can get tied up in data-fueled abstractions: millions in debt, thousands dying from starvation. The story of a single person, or a small group connects on an entirely different level.

However persuasive, they are subject to the same limitations that all anecdotes are. Anecdotes are by definition a single experience. This small “sample size” makes it difficult to generalize the lessons from an anecdote, and makes it easy to manipulate opinion. Ronald Regan, for better or worse, was a master when it came to using these kinds of anecdotes. Incredibly moralistic and persuasive, but of dubious validity.

Given Novogratz’s emphasis of “on the ground” system development, any deviation from the anecdote-based structure would fall flat. Her discussion of the aid and psychic environment surrounding the Rwandan genocide (from 3:47-4:30) seems out of place. She follows it up with the lessons learned from a situation she has not fully explained. Though the lessons sound great, it’s absolutely critical to flesh out their context, or else they’re just baseless platitudes.

Key quotes:
“I tell that story because it has served serves and continues to serve as a metaphor to me of the level of connectedness that we all have on this earth. We so often don’t realize what our action and our inaction does to people we think we will never see and never know. I also tell it because it tells a larger contextual story of what aid is and can be. That this traveled into the good will in Virginia, and moved its way into the larger industry, which at that point was giving millions of tons of second-hand clothing to Africa and Asia, which was a very good thing, providing low-cost clothing. And at the same time, certainly in Rwanda, it destroyed the local retailing industry.”

“We learned a lot about how you sell things, not coming in with our own notions. Because she didn’t even talk about malaria until the very end first she talked about comfort, status, beauty: ‘these nets,’ she said, ‘you put them on the floor, bugs leave your house. Children sleep through the night, the house looks beautiful, you hang them in the window,’ we started make curtains. ‘Not only is it beautiful, but people can see – status – that you care about your children. Only then did she talk about saving your children’s lives.’

“It’s about understanding that people really don’t want hand outs. They want to make their own decisions; they want to solve their own problems.”

Noodle Scratchers:
What do you think about how Jacqueline sold the malaria bed nets? How might you apply the lessons of that story?