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

I was going to save the world, and I thought I would start with the African continent.

I believe the government should ensure all children are provided with a good education.

I've heard it said that the most dangerous animal on the planet is the adolescent male.

Listening is not only about waiting, but it's also learning how better to ask questions.

Honour what is most beautiful about the past and build it into the promise of the future.

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

We are connected to each other not only as humans, but to every living thing on the planet.

Our actions - and inaction - touch people we may never know and never meet across the globe.

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

There are probably no more market-oriented individuals on the planet, than low income people.

If there's one value that is immutable, it's integrity or respect, for others and for yourself.

We live in a world in which we're seeing an increasing gap between the haves and the have-nots.

What farmers gain most of all from the increase in agricultural productivity, of course, is choice.

The poor also are willing to make, and do make, smart decisions, if you give them that opportunity.

Sometimes very small investments can release enormous, infinite potential that exists in all of us.

Human beings tend not to spend money on health preventionally. We tend to spend it on top treatment.

Poverty is not only about income levels, but for lack of freedom that comes from physical insecurity

There is power in creating a small model, and then you can create an alliance of other small models.

We often don't realize what our action & our inaction do to people we think we will never see & never know.

When I first went to Africa, I thought that I was personally going to save the continent, if not the world.

Standing with the poor means walking away from unethical leaders, even when their companies are 'succeeding.'

People have to understand that unless social enterprise is experimental, it will not succeed in making a difference.

I wrote 'The Blue Sweater' to inspire more people to become engaged in working to solve the problems of global poverty.

Many business leaders are seeing the relationship between long term success and sustainability, and that's very heartening.

May each of you live lives of immersion. They won't necessarily be easy lives. But in the end, it is all that will sustain us.

One of the first things that surprised me in a positive, wonderfully positive way, is that this works - patient capital works.

We can send people to the Moon; we can see if there's life on Mars - why can't we get $5 [mosquito] nets to 500 million people?

My dream is to find individuals who take financial resources and convert them into changing the world in the most positive ways.

Wealth today has been created by a world view dominated by fast-moving networks, open information, bottom-up entrepreneurialism.

You have to learn to ask questions in a way that will elicit more nuanced answers, rather than the answers you would like to get.

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

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

Through the Fellows Program, Acumen Fund prepares future global leaders with the tools necessary to drive significant social change.

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

I am an insomniac. Most of my nights include a moment of wakening. Often I will make my way to the kitchen to make tea and read for awhile.

There's a real moral imperative in being an organization that takes the time to sit and listen to the customers and the people they're serving.

People need to believe that they can participate fully in the decisions that affect their lives and have a stake in the societies in which they live

President Kennedy said that those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. I would say that the converse is true.

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.

Acumen Fund's patient capital investment in Western Seed is intended to enhance the food security and economic independence of Kenya's smallholder farmers.

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.

Despite the hundreds of non-governmental organizations and the continued outpouring of foreign aid, East Africa remains as a region overwhelmed by extreme poverty.

Why do some people stop growing at age 30, just going from work to the couch and television, when others stay vibrant, curious, almost childlike into their nineties?

As a 25-year-old banker, I decided to leave my career and change the world. This sounds like a move that a 25-year-old banker might make today - to escape the chaos.

When Jeff Sachs says every poor person should receive a free bed net, I agree - but in reality, many end up not receiving one. And I don't live in a world of shoulds.

Entrepreneurs are the seekers of solutions, and that they will go into these places where both market and traditional aid has failed or traditional charity has failed.

When I see people that are my age and reaching 50, the ones that are really sparkly and full of joy are the ones that are committed to something bigger than themselves.

I dream a world in no one feels the need for or fear of predatory behavior, in which each of us walks with the knowledge of how beautiful - and valuable - is each human life.

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?

Share This Page