Quotes from Jacqueline Novogratz

Malaria is a disease that kills one to three million people a year. 300 to 500 million cases are reported. It's estimated that Africa loses about 13 billion dollars a year to the disease. Five dollars can save a life. We can send people to the moon; we can see if there's life on Mars - why can't we get five-dollar nets to 500 million people?

What we yearn for as human beings is to be visible to each other.

People across the world are yearning to be connected to stories of hope.

I have seen that traditional approaches to charity and aid don't solve problems of poverty. In fact, too often they create dependence.

Monsters will always exist. There's one inside each of us. But an angel lives there, too. There is no more important agenda than figuring out how to slay one and nurture the other.

Five days in Nairobi slums changes you.

I think we so often equate leadership with being experts - the leader is supposed to come in and fix things. But in this interconnected world we live in now, it's almost impossible for just one person to do that.

There are cases where government-to-government aid actually has worked. Look at the eradication of smallpox and the near eradication of polio. But these are really top down solutions that require government-to-government support and aid.

Human beings want to see each other. We want to be heard by each other.

It's about all of us, and the kind of world that we, together, want to live in and share.

People really don't want handouts, that they want to make their own decisions.

As both developed and developing nations search for alternative sources of energy in response to the growing energy crisis, we at Acumen Fund believe that investing in entrepreneurs who provide innovative energy solutions is an increasingly critical part of the solution.

Impact investing has become a broad umbrella that includes all investing with a focus on both financial return and social impact, but in its best form, impact investing prioritizes impact over returns and achieves outcomes that traditional investing cannot.

Too often people view idealists as naive.

In the case of maternal health care, you look at, well naturally, it's the mother who's the customer, who makes the decisions. But in truth, the mother in many areas, in certain parts of India, the mother has very little decision-making power at all. The real decision-maker is the mother-in-law.

Even when early innovations start to succeed, it is not uncommon to see growing businesses sabotaged for threatening the status quo.

This idea of universal access to basic healthcare has to be figured out as a world. No country has figured it out in part because it is driven by ideology.

Girls and women are most victimised in societies where boys and men are disempowered.

Each of us can work to change a small portion of events. And it's in the total of all those acts that the history of this generation will be written.

Our actions - and inaction - touch people every day, people we may never know and never meet.

What would the world look like if we asked ourselves the following more often; are our actions helping others find a way to feel more freer, more dignified and more beautiful?

Just start Don't wait for perfection. Just start and let the work teach you.

I still feel that the kind of leader I want to be is one that spends time understanding our work in a way that allows me to translate it for policymakers and people who have real access to resources.

Where micro-finance focuses on small loans to individual, low-income women, think of Acumen Fund more like a venture capital fund.