Music for Life International and American Pakistan Foundation present
Beethoven for the Indus Valley
The Beneficiary / Remarks by Jacqueline Novogratz
JACQUELINE NOVOGRATZ
Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Acumen Fund
Jacqueline Novogratz is the founder and CEO of Acumen Fund, a non-profit global venture fund that uses entrepreneurial approaches to solve the problems of global poverty.

Acumen Fund invests patient capital to identify, strengthen and scale business models that effectively serve the poor and champions this approach as an effective complement to traditional aid. Acumen Fund currently manages over $50 million in investments in South Asia and East Africa, focused on delivering affordable water, healthcare, energy, housing and agriculture inputs to low-income consumers.

Since 2002 Acumen Fund has invested over $11m in Pakistan. Jacqueline is a frequent visitor to the country, often making several trips a year. She last visited Pakistan in September after the floods to understand the devastating impact and wrote about her experience, sharing individual stories from survivors and highlighting the incredible relief efforts being undertaken by many in the Acumen Fund community. Jacqueline also spoke at TEDxKarachi in April 2010, where she highlighted the need for patient capital investing as an effective compliment to traditional aid. As a contributor to Huffington Post, Jacqueline has written about the need to build communities in Pakistan.

Prior to Acumen Fund, Jacqueline founded and directed The Philanthropy Workshop and The Next Generation Leadership programs at the Rockefeller Foundation. She also founded Duterimbere, a micro-finance institution in Rwanda. She began her career in international banking with Chase Manhattan Bank.

She is currently on the advisory boards of Stanford Graduate School of Business, MIT’s Legatum Center, and Innovations Journal published by MIT Press. Jacqueline serves on the Aspen Institute Board of Trustees and as a member of two World Economic Forum Global Agenda Councils, on Social Entrepreneurship and on Water. She was recently named to Foreign Policy’s list of Top 100 Global Thinkers and Daily Beast’s 25 Smartest People of the Decade. Jacqueline is a frequent speaker at the Clinton Global Initiative and TED. She has an MBA from Stanford and a BA in Economics/International Relations from the University of Virginia.

Her recent best-selling memoir, The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World, released in paperback on February 16, 2010, chronicles her quest to understand poverty and challenges readers to grant dignity to the poor and to rethink their engagement with the world.

For more information on Acumen Fund, please visit www.acumenfund.org.

For further details on Jacqueline’s book The Blue Sweater, go to www.thebluesweater.com.