What it takes to make change Jacqueline Novogratz
A few years ago,
I found myself in Kigali, Rwanda
presenting a plan to bring
off-grid solar electricity
to 10 million low-income East Africans.
As I waited to speak
to the president and his ministers,
I thought about how I’d arrived
in that same place 30 years before.
A 25-year-old who left
her career in banking
to cofound the nation’s first
microfinance bank
with a small group of Rwandan women.
And that happened just a few months
after women had gained the right
to open a bank account
without their husband’s signature.
Just before I got on stage,
a young woman approached me.
“Ms. Novogratz,” she said,
“I think you knew my auntie.”
“Really?
What was her name?”
She said, “Felicula.”
I could feel tears well.
One of the first women
parliamentarians in the country,
Felicula was a cofounder,
but soon after we’d established the bank,
Felicula was killed
in a mysterious hit-and-run accident.
Some associated her death
to a policy she had sponsored
to abolish bride price,
or the practice of paying a man
for the hand of his daughter in marriage.
I was devastated by her death.
And then a few years after that,
after I’d left the country,
Rwanda exploded in genocide.
And I have to admit there were times
when I thought about
all the work so many had done,
and I wondered what it had amounted to.
I turned back to the woman.
“I’m sorry, would you tell me
who you are again?”
She said, “Yes, my name is Monique,
and I’m the deputy governor
of Rwanda’s National Bank.”
If you had told me
when we were just getting started
that within a single generation,
a young woman will go on to help lead
her nation’s financial sector,
I’m not sure I would have believed you.
And I understood
that I was back in that same place
to continue work Felicula had started
but could not complete in her lifetime.
And that it was to me to recommit
to dreams so big I might
not complete them in mine.
That night I decided to write
a letter to the next generation
because so many have passed on
their wisdom and knowledge to me,
because I feel a growing sense of urgency
that I might not finish
the work I came to do,
and because I want to pass that forward
to everyone who wants
to create change in this world
in ways that only they can do.
That generation is in the streets.
They are crying urgently
for wholesale change
against racial injustice,
religious and ethnic persecution,
catastrophic climate change
and the cruel inequality
that has left us more divided
and divisive than ever in my lifetime.
But what would I say to them?
I’m a builder, so I started
by focusing on technical fixes,
but our problems are too interdependent,
too entangled.
We need more than a system shift.
We need a mind shift.
Plato wrote that a country
cultivates what it honors.
For too long, we have defined success
based on money, power and fame.
Now we have to start the hard,
long work of moral revolution.
By that I mean putting our shared humanity
and the sustainability of the earth
at the center of our systems,
and prioritizing the collective we,
not the individual I.
What if each of us gave more
to the world than we took from it?
Everything would change.
Now cynics might say
that sounds too idealistic,
but cynics don’t create the future.
And though I’ve learned the folly
of unbridled optimism,
I stand with those
who hold to hard-edged hope.
I know that change is possible.
The entrepreneurs and change agents
with whom my team and I have worked
have impacted more than 300 million
low-income people,
and sometimes reshaped
entire sectors to include the poor.
But you can’t really talk
about moral revolution
without grounding it
in practicality and meaning,
and that requires an entirely
new set of operating principles.
Let me share just three.
The first is moral imagination.
Too often we use the lens
only of our own imagination,
even when designing solutions
for people whose lives
are completely different from our own.
Moral imagination starts by seeing
others as equal to ourselves,
neither above nor below us,
neither idealizing nor victimizing.
It requires immersing
in the lives of others,
understanding the structures
that get in their way
and being honest about where
they might be holding themselves back.
That requires deep listening
from a place of inquiry,
not certainty.
Several years ago I sat
with a group of women weavers
outside in a rural village in Pakistan.
The day was hot …
over 120 degrees in the shade.
I wanted to tell the women about
a company my organization had invested in
that was bringing solar light to millions
of people across India and East Africa,
and I had seen the transformative
power of that light
to allow people to do things
so many of us just take for granted.
“We have this light” I said,
“costs about seven dollars.
People say it’s amazing.
If we could convince the company
to bring those products to Pakistan,
would you all be interested?”
The women stared,
and then a big woman whose hands
knew hard work looked at me,
wiped the sweat off her face and said,
“We don’t want a light.
We’re hot.
Bring us a fan.”
“Fan,” I said.
“We don’t have a fan.
We have a light.
But if you had this light,
your kids can study at night,
you can work more – "
She cut me off.
“We work enough. We’re hot.
Bring us a fan.”
That straight-talking conversation
deepened my moral imagination.
And I remember lying –
sweltering in my bed
in my tiny guest house that night,
so grateful for the clickety-clack
of the fan overhead.
And I thought, “Of course.
Electricity.
A fan.
Dignity.”
And when I now visit our companies
who’ve reached over 100 million people
with light and electricity
and it’s a really hot place,
and if there’s a rooftop system,
there is also a fan.
But moral imagination is also needed
to rebuild and heal our countries.
My nation is roiling
as it finally confronts
what it’s not wanted to see.
It would be impossible to deny
the legacy of American slavery
if all of us truly immersed
in the lives of Black people.
Every nation begins the process of healing
when its people begin to see each other
and to understand that it is in that work
that are planted the seeds
of our individual
and collective transformation.
Now that requires acknowledging
the light and shadow,
the good and evil that exist
in every human being.
In our world we have to learn
to partner with those
even whom we consider our adversaries.
This leads to the second principle:
holding opposing values in tension.
Too many of our leaders today
stand on one corner or the other,
shouting.
Moral leaders reject
the wall of either-or.
They’re willing to acknowledge a truth
or even a partial truth
in what the other side believes.
And they gain trust
by making principled decisions
in service of other people,
not themselves.
To succeed in my work
has required holding the tension
between the power of markets
to enable innovation and prosperity
and their peril to allow for exclusion
and sometimes exploitation.
Those who see the sole purpose
of business as profit
are not comfortable with that tension,
nor are those who have
no trust in business at all.
But standing on either side
negates the creative, generative potential
of learning to use markets
without being seduced by them.
Take chocolate.
It’s a hundred-billion-dollar industry
dependent on the labor of about
five million smallholder farming families
who receive only a tiny fraction
of that 100 billion.
In fact, 90 percent of them
make under two dollars a day.
But there’s a generation
of new entrepreneurs
that is trying to change that.
They start by understanding
the production costs of the farmers.
They agree to a price that allows
the farmers to actually earn income
in a way that will sustain their lives.
Sometimes including revenue-share
and ownership models,
building a community of trust.
Now are these companies as profitable
as those that focus
solely on shareholder value?
Possibly not in the short term.
But these entrepreneurs
are focused on solving problems.
They’re tired of easy slogans
like “doing well by doing good.”
They know they have to be
financially sustainable,
and they are insisting on including
the poor and the vulnerable
in their definition of success.
And that brings me to the third principle:
accompaniment.
It’s actually a Jesuit term
that means to walk alongside:
I’ll hold a mirror to you,
help you see your potential,
maybe more than you see it yourself.
I’ll take on your problem
but I can’t solve it for you –
that you have to learn to do.
For example, in Harlem
there’s an organization
called City Health Works
that hires local residents
with no previous health care experience,
trains them to work with other residents
so that they can better control
chronic diseases like gout,
hypertension, diabetes.
I had the great pleasure
of meeting Destini Belton,
one of the health workers,
who explained her job to me.
She said that she checks in on clients,
checks their vital signs,
takes them grocery shopping,
goes on long walks,
has conversations.
She told me, “I let them know
somebody has their back.”
And the results have been astounding.
Patients are healthier,
hospitals less burdened.
As for Destini,
she tells me her family
and she are healthier.
“And,” she adds, “I love that I get
to contribute to my community.”
All of us yearn to be seen,
to count.
The work of change,
of moral revolution,
is hard.
But we don’t change in the easy times.
We change in the difficult times.
In fact, I’ve come to see discomfort
as a proxy for progress.
But there’s one more thing.
There’s something I wish I’d known
when I was just starting out
so many years ago.
No matter how hard it gets,
there’s always beauty to be found.
I remember now what seems a long time ago,
spending an entire day
talking to woman after woman
in the Mathare Valley slum
in Nairobi, Kenya.
I listened to their stories
of struggle and survival
as they talked about losing children,
of fighting violence and hunger,
sometimes feeling
like they wouldn’t even survive.
And right before I left,
a huge rainstorm poured down.
And I was sitting in my little car
as the wheels stuck in the mud
thinking, “I’m never getting out of here,”
when suddenly there was
a tap on my window –
a woman who was beckoning
me to follow her,
and I did.
Jumped out through the rainstorm,
we went down this little muddy path,
through a rickety metal door,
inside a shack
where a group of women
were dancing with abandon.
I jumped in and found myself lost
in the rhythm and the color and the smiles
and suddenly I realized:
this is what we do as human beings.
When we’re broken,
when we feel that we are failing
or are in despair,
we dance.
We sing.
We pray.
Beauty resides too in showing up,
in paying attention,
in being kind when we feel
like being anything but kind.
Look at the explosion of art
and music and poetry
in this moment of our collective crisis.
It is in the darkest times
that we have the chance
to find our deepest beauty.
So let this be our moment
to move forward
with the fierce urgency
of a new generation
fortified with our most profound
and collective wisdom.
And ask yourself:
what can you do with the rest of today
and the rest of your life
to give back more
to the world than you take?
Thank you.