The Blue Sweater by Jacqueline Novogratz

I started this book over the Christmas and New Year's break and it proved to be an engaging and intellectually challenging read. Fresh out of college, Jacqueline joined a renowned bank as an international credit analyst which endowed on her the opportunity to travel extensively and compare international banking systems. Before long, she was offered a once in a lifetime opportunity to travel to various parts of Africa to implement a micro-finance system.

Micro-finance is a generic term referred to the practice of providing financial services to low income people and sometimes the self-employed who traditionally lack access to banking and related services. These individuals have no credit reports or credit history, a fundamental problem, which deem them as trustworthy customers by the banks. The idea of micro-finance was invented perhaps hundreds of years ago first by the Franciscan monks and also has its origins stemming from the microcredit movement led by Muhammad Yunus, who is almost synonymous with the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh.

Using her international banking knowledge, Jacqueline embarked on a treacherous career to help create the infrastructure for microfinance at Duterimbere in Rwanda. It was a bold move, given the oppression of women in many African countries, the language barrier, cultural differences in "conducting business", and many other forms of difficulties which she obviously hadn't thought through so well before agreeing to the job. Nonetheless, the 2009 book shares lascivious details on how she stumbled upon each of these difficulties and relentlessly worked her way around them.

Unfortunately for her, her illustrious work in microfinance at Duterimbere, which is Rwanda's first microfinance institution, and a couple other business led by women were eradicated by the Rwanda genocide in 1994. What was astounding is that, given her account, she had simply no idea that the tension between the minority Tutsi and the majority Hutu even existed while she was in Rwanda. Although on various occasions, she did find her security threatened especially as a white female, but never could she had predicted the genocide of over 800,000 people a few years after she left. The Rwanda genocide was brought into the mainstream media by a popular movie called Hotel Rwanda, which I also highly recommend on a side note.

After leaving Rwanda, Jacqueline moved on to establish the Acumen Fund, a non-profit global venture capital fund to solve the problems of global poverty. Acumen Fund's approach is entrepreneurial and refreshing in a world that is inundated with lofty goals to alleviate world poverty but with little results to provide. A dedicated arm of the Acumen Fund focuses on health care related issues, providing investment capital for ambulance fleets in Mumbai, India for example.

I find myself agreeing too much with Jacqueline's perspective and approach, which doesn't happen too often. Perhaps the business part of myself appreciates her deep belief in the importance of a competitive business, regardless whether it is a for-profit, non-profit, or social business. Only when the fundamental design is surrounded by controls, accountability, and progressiveness can a business be sustainable. Her story also invokes the understanding that financing is the foundation of any enterprise. Health care financing is no different, again allow me to use the fact that the unsustainable growth of the American health care enterprise is because its financing network is broken.

I highly recommend this book for anyone who is interested in international development, or just craving for a non-fiction book with great, moving anecdotes. By the way, to satisfy your curiosity, the book is titled the Blue Sweater based on her donation of a blue sweater to Goodwill, only to find the same sweater years later on a young Rwandan boy; the true epitome of an interconnected world!