The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World (43 page)

Since that visit in 2005, WHI has grown to serve more than 200 villages with more than 350,000 customers. And it has raised more than $12 million in additional capital. Now the goal is to issue a large bond in order to reach millions of people with safe water.

Recently, I visited another WHI plant, more urban but still seemingly in the middle of nowhere, at the edge of a beautiful lotus pond ringed by palm trees and little houses with thatched roofs. Like many of the WHI installations, the plant was situated close to the government water source that provided free but undrinkable water. This way, customers could pick up the free water for washing and then pay for what they needed for drinking and cooking.

Most of the people in the village worked as laborers in the nearby rice mills or as farmers, earning between $1 and $3 a day. In the case of this WHI site, the Lions Club had donated the initial plant, which the community was responsible for running as a viable business. A cheerful village resident managed the plant on a daily basis and oversaw several employees while also talking incessantly to a stream of customers waiting to purchase their families' water supply for the following few days.

A mustached customer wearing the uniform of an engineer, a checked shirt with a pair of reading glasses tucked in the pocket and a baseball cap, sauntered up to the plant. In fact, he turned out not to be an engineer, but a day laborer working on odd jobs. But you could sense his drive and ambition by the very way he walked and dressed. When I asked him when he had started buying water from WHI, he replied that he'd started on the first day of the plant's existence.

Previously, he'd had to walk a fair distance to pay a high price for safe water. He liked the WHI price of about a rupee per liter, enjoyed the taste of this water more, and appreciated the plant's proximity to his family's home. I asked whether his life had changed. He nodded, saying that the family experienced less diarrhea and other common diseases. He thought the price was right and the service, satisfactory. As I watched the man place his filled container on his bicycle and pedal away, I thought about how smart he was, how much he would do for his family if only he had the opportunities.

If Acumen Fund were a normal investment firm or even a socially responsible investment firm, we would be thrilled by the growing financial progress of WHI and leave it at that. But we started Acumen Fund because we believed the markets were the starting point and not the endgame for solving problems of poverty. Our team wants to understand what it takes to bring the greatest number of people safe water in a way that is affordable, reaches millions, and sustains itself over time.

It was important to track what people did with the water once it arrived at their homes. WHI sells the water in 15-liter sanitary plastic containers, which is a great start. However, a problem arises when some customers pour the water into contaminated clay pitchers. People in rural Andhra Pradesh-from the poorest Rajput woman to a maharaja-all seem to prefer clay to plastic or glass for their water because it has evaporative qualities that make it serve as a natural cooler. This we discovered while collaborating with the design firm IDEO, which shares Acumen Fund's belief in systems that build customer-focused solutions. Though IDEO works with some of the world's largest companies, the framework for listening to people of any economic stratum is the same. IDEO preferred not to try and convince low-income people that they should switch to plastic water containers, but rather to see whether it was possible to design clay containers that could be sanitized regularly.

We also have been working with the Gates Foundation and a global research organization to listen to the poor to try and understand what really happens when people start drinking safe water. We want to gain insights into how to get more people to do so. Changing any kind of behavior is not easy. And in places like rural India, most people think water comes from God, so there is a lot of pressure to accept whatever God decides to give you. Convincing people that they nonetheless have a choice about the kind of water they drink is neither easy nor free. It is why nonprofit groups like Naandi are so important to the larger solution.

In this case, Acumen Fund works with WHI, a for-profit company that partners with Naandi, a local NGO. We guarantee loans for and have a working relationship with a commercial bank, ICICI. We work closely with the Gates Foundation and with the nonprofit Research Triangle Institute and have embarked on a joint venture with a for-profit design firm. Most villages that want to install a plant are required to get the blessing of the local panchayat, or government official. And the communication and negotiation, the learning, failing, succeeding, and learning all over again require real and long-term commitments from the different players involved. It isn't a simple solution, but the problem isn't simple, either, though each part of the answer is pretty straightforward.

It is this commitment across sectors, disciplines, geography, and profit status, as well as a focus on a common goal that enables WHI to thrive and increasingly become a symbol of what is possible in using markets as part of a solution. WHI is bringing one of the most precious resources on earth to the world's very poor and doing so in a way that makes sense, creates jobs, and respects the integrity and needs of all people. Doing this well requires a certain kind of leadership, one that starts with listening, knows how to collaborate, is not satisfied with easy but incomplete answers, and is driven by finding solutions for those with the least in a single world community. What is exciting is that we're starting to find such leaders and can see many more coming along the long row we need to hoe together.

CHAPTER 16

THE WORLD WE DREAM,
THE FUTURE WE CREATE
TOGETHER

"Few will have the greatness to bend history itselfbut each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation."

-ROBERT F. KENNEDY

hirty summers have passed since I gave away the blue sweater that ended up on a little Rwandan boy. Since then, the world has greatly changed. The boy I encountered had never seen a television show, made a telephone call, or taken a photograph, whereas his counterpart today, an urban youth wearing secondhand clothes in Kigali, is likely to have access to a cell phone and the Internet. As for my counterpart, today's 20-something professional working in Kigali won't feel the isolation I did; she is likely to e-mail and call her friends on Skype at least once a day and check her local newspaper on the Internet to learn about the goings-on at home. We have the tools to know one another and the resources to create a future in which every human being, rich or poor, has a real chance to pursue a life of greater purpose.

I have changed, too. After more than 20 years of working in Africa, India, and Pakistan, I've learned that solutions to poverty must be driven by discipline, accountability, and market strength, not easy sentimentality. I've learned that many of the answers to poverty lie in the space between the market and charity and that what is needed most of all is moral leadership willing to build solutions from the perspectives of poor people themselves rather than imposing grand theories and plans upon them.

I've learned that people usually tell you the truth if you listen hard enough. If you don't, you'll hear what they think you want to hear.

I've learned that there is no currency like trust and no catalyst like hope. There is nothing worse for building relationships than pandering, on one hand, or preaching, on the other. And the most important quality we must all strengthen in ourselves is that of deep human empathy, for that will provide the most hope of all-and the foundation for our collective survival.

I've learned that generosity is far easier than justice and that, in the highly distorted markets of the poor, it is all too easy to veer only toward the charitable, to have low-or no-expectations for low-income people. This does nothing but reaffirm prejudices on all sides.

I've learned how profoundly the world is interconnected in a single economy linking all parts of the globe. Extraordinary wealth has been generated by this global economy, and millions of people have been lifted out of poverty. Yet it brings as much danger as hope unless and until every single one of us gets a fair chance to participate.

I have learned all of this through the extraordinary people I have had the privilege to know, the colleagues with whom I have worked, my fellow travelers, and the family and friends I have loved. One of my favorite lines from Tennyson's "Ulysses" is "I am a part of all that I have met." And they-every one of them, good and bad-are a part of me.

A grandmother and a little girl, one from Kenya, the other, Pakistan, stand out as reminders of the extraordinary capacity of the human spirit. I met Beatrice, a member of Jamii Bora, a nonprofit organization started with the savings of 50 beggar families in Nairobi that has grown to more than 200,000 slum dwellers. Acumen Fund has been supporting the organization's efforts to build and sell 2,000 houses in a new, ecologically sound development.

A woman with a wide, square face, her hair pinned neatly in a bun, Beatrice had rodlike posture and looked at me directly when she spoke. She bore and raised eight children in Mathare Valley, one of Kenya's poorest and toughest slums, where I danced with the women on that rainy night so long ago. She worked constantly, never resting, earning little but still ensuring that all of her children were raised properly and given a good education; this was one of her proudest accomplishments.

No one could have prepared her for the shock of learning that her eldest son and his wife were dying of AIDS, leaving her to care for their four children. A year later, another child passed away, and then another. By 2000, every single one of her children had died, leaving her with a dozen grandchildren to raise, though she had neither a husband nor a real source of income.

"I was so desperate," she said, her hands clasped gently in front of her, her round eyes shaded with sorrow. "I thought of making porridge and putting poison in it to end the lives of the children and myself. I could think of no way to take care of everyone."

A friend told her about Jamii Bora and helped her save so she could earn the right to take a loan from the organization. Beatrice borrowed enough to start selling french fries, and as she succeeded, she borrowed more and more, adding rooms to her house so she could rent them, and establishing a water kiosk as well as a butcher shop and a hair salon.

Today, Beatrice has five businesses, 11 employees, and 21 rooms for rent. Her eldest grandson is training to be a lawyer and three others are in high school. All of them work-at times, with her.

Or at least that was the situation a few months before I wrote this passage, just a week after Kenya's questionable December 2007 election results unleashed widespread violence and unrest, devastating the slums where Beatrice and most of the other members live. Jamii Bora's intrepid founder, Ingrid Monro, a Swedish woman in her sixties with pale blue eyes and blonde hair tied loosely in a ponytail, told us that nearly half the members of the organization, who have worked so hard to lift themselves out of poverty, had been affected, but were still working to recoup their losses and to help those who lost even more. What happened in Kenya is a reminder to all of us of the dangers inherent in a world with a rising gap between rich and poor, especially in the developing world, where more than half of the population is under 25 years of age.

The psychology of poverty is so complex. It is so often the people who know the greatest suffering-the poor and most vulnerable-who are the most resilient, the ones able to derive happiness and shared joy from the simplest pleasures. Think of the women dancing in the slums, the fortitude of Charlotte after the genocide, the goodness of Honorata.

That same resilience, however, can manifest itself in passivity, fatalism, a resignation to the difficulties of life that allows injustice and inequity to strengthen and grow, to solidify into a system where people forget to question until an event or series of events wakes up the next generation. For adolescent boys especially, the excitement and camaraderie of doing battle can outweigh the dreary prospects of a future driven by low expectations and even fewer hopes.

It is not just Pakistan and Kenya that are feeling the strains. Bihar, India, where Drishtee operates, has seen the rise of a Naxalite movement, an offshoot of Nepalese Maoism, whose adherents reject modernity through their armed militia groups.

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. This is why it is so critical to identify and invest in those rare entrepreneurs who see true human capacity in all people and are working on ways to unleash it. Ingrid Monro told me that Jamii Bora belongs to the whole world.

"After all," she said, "all of us came from people who were this poor at some point. Why do we continue to separate ourselves?"