Acumen Fund's corporate culture encourages curiosity, livelong learning, and intellectual pursuit. As Acumen Fund works with us to develop our "moral imaginations", we have read seven books (mostly novels) which we will discuss each week over the next two months. This week's book is King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild.

My thoughts on the book:
I found King Leopold’s Ghost to be very powerful. I knew very little about the Congo and nothing about its colonization and slavery. I was so appalled to read what had happened in the Congo so recently that for the two weeks I was reading the book, told the story about King Leopold to anyone who would listen. The way that King Leopold was able to deceive the world so effectively and convince everyone that he was being charitable and “saving” the Congolese while enslaving the people in their own country was astonishing.

The descriptions of the forced rubber gathering (including the hostage taking and hand severing) were particularly disturbing. It is hard to image how 20th century Europeans could justify this level of mistreatment and tyranny and it is clear that they thought of the Congolese as sub-human. “To Europeans, Africans were inferior beings: lazy, uncivilized, little better than animals. In fact, the most common way they were put to work was, like animals, as beasts of burden. In any system of terror, the functionaries must first see the victims as less than human, and Victorian ideas about race provided such a foundation.” (p. 121).

In the U.S., we don’t hear much about the Congo, but the news we do hear is generally bad. Now knowing its history over the past 100+ years, it is not surprising that the country is in disarray and the people suffer from deep poverty. While there seems to be some hope for countries like Uganda or Kenya. It is more difficult to remain optimistic about the Congo.

Walking out of the Acumen Fund office with a $5 bill, a $6 subway card, a driver’s license, and a list of shelters, soup kitchens, and public hospitals, I felt nervous and overwhelmed. How could I determine “the effectiveness of social services in New York from the perspective of the poor” by 5 p.m.?

I started at a drop-in center a few blocks away and was quickly turned away when I claimed to be a journalist and asked to take a look around and talk to the clients. Fortunately, two men I passed in the stairwell on the way out offered to share their stories. Dan was a 20-something, college-educated artist and Scott was a 40-something carpenter. Both were well-dressed and well-spoken and had been in and out of shelters for several years. Every day, both men leafed through the classifieds, applied for jobs, and asked around for temporary work. Dan and Scott explained that it was important for them to do work that they enjoyed.

Dan and Scott talked about their struggle to maintain self-respect. This is hard when even the shelter’s resident pastor laughs when you offer to help with the church’s renovations or when your options are to sleep in the park or on four chairs in the noisy shelter. We talked about what homeless people need and I learned that the assistance to get a job, find an apartment, and then stay employed and housed was difficult to come by. I comprehended some of the difficulties when I tried to use the internet at the public library and decided that my 15 minutes of computer time weren’t worth the long wait. Stops at the New York Human Resource Administration, Salvation Army, Mary House, and Waverly Job Center also yielded no assistance.

A conversation about the importance of being a “good person” led to Scott’s remark, “You asked what people need most? What they need most is hope that things will get better.” I spent the following six hours pretending to be poor to better understand what he meant by this.


Throughout the day, I was pleased to see how friendly and kind people were and how much the poor help one another negotiate the system. At a clothing distribution center and soup kitchen, I was invited to pick out a sweater from the tables of clothes, served a hot lunch, and offered a shower. While I spoke with Marion, an assistant teacher, about the difficulties of finding a job and affordable housing, the other women at my table excitedly swapped their newly-acquired clothing. The people in line applying for food stamps and Medicaid, and those in the emergency room at a public hospital in the Bronx, were eager to help me complete the forms and share some tips.

At the end of the day, we were excited to see each other and share our stories. We all found that while the system is complicated and time-consuming, we are fortunate that the U.S. does provide many services to the poor and that the poor have formed supportive communities to help each other negotiate the system. I hadn’t expected that those delivering and those receiving the services would be so kind, helpful, and supportive and was uplifted that all of us had experienced the same thing.

Below are the bios of the 2006 class of Acumen Fund fellows. While their backgrounds are quite impressive, more importantly, they make me think and make me laugh. I am confident that they will be more than colleagues, these people will become my friends.

Ayeleen Ajanee
The first Pakistani to attend the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, Ayeleen is finishing an MBA, specializing in Strategic Marketing. After high school in Karachi, Pakistan, she graduated from the Southern Methodist University of Texas with a BS in Mechanical Engineering. Returning to Karachi in 2003, Ayeleen joined Unilever Pakistan as an Area Engineer, the first woman ever to hold such a position. Still an active member of her local mosque school, Ayeleen helped devise the curriculum and establish a library.

Eric Berkowitz
Eric consults on projects in India, China and the U.S. in the areas of microfinance, financial services and business development. Previously, he was a consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers and served as Director of the China office at Tractus-Asia, where he assisted foreign companies making investment decisions and setting up operations in Asia. Eric holds a BS in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University and an MBA from the Wharton School.

Adrien Couton
With experience studying and working in eight different countries, Adrien’s professional background includes private equity, an internet start-up, the World Bank (for water and sanitation consulting) and four years with McKinsey & Company, working mostly in the energy and transportation sectors. He holds a Masters in Management from HEC Paris, a Masters in Political Sciences from Université de la Sorbonne, and a Masters in Public Administration from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

David Lehr
A Reuters Digital Vision Fellow, David is currently a principal in an early-stage venture that delivers customized market data via mobile phones to farmers in the developing world. Previously, David held management roles with key Silicon Valley companies, including launching Adobe Systems in China. He holds a Masters of Pacific International Affairs from the University of California, San Diego, and a BA in economics from the State University of New York at Albany.

Keely Stevenson
Before Acumen, Keely was working to start up a development program for social entrepreneurs in India (www.social-impact.org), Keely has worked for Triodos Bank UK, the Royal Bafokeng Nation in South Africa, the Skoll Foundation, the California Senate and was a United Nations Fellow. She was an Honors Alumni Scholar at University of California, Berkeley and earned her MBA in Management and Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford’s Said Business School. A Skoll Scholar in Social Entrepreneurship, Keely created Social Edge (www.socialedge.com), the world’s first online community for social entrepreneurs.

Nadaa Taiyab
Nadaa just finished a Masters at Tufts in International Business and International Environmental Policy, with a focus on climate change, carbon markets and sustainable development. She has worked as a financial analyst in the Investment Banking Division of Goldmans Sachs in New York and for the World Bank in Indonesia, piloting a project for private sector development in post-conflict areas. Nadaa obtained her undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania in International Relations. Born in Sri Lanka, she grew up in Indonesia and Canada.

Jocelyn Wyatt
Jocelyn just finished an MBA at Thunderbird, where she organized the Net Impact Global Citizenship Challenge and the International Development Association Microfinance Conference. Previously, Jocelyn served as Country Director for Scojo in India and was responsible for overseeing all aspects of the program including finance, accounting, marketing, distribution, inventory management and training. She also worked for five years for Chemonics International, a contractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Washington, DC.

After spending close to a week on Madeline Island, one of the most peaceful places on earth (or at least in Wisconsin), I fly to New York and immediately begin my fellowship program with Acumen Fund. While I had visited New York many times, I had not experienced a rush hour commute. Over the past two years I had become accostomed to life as a student and living in a big city and keeping normal office hours has been a bit of a shock to the system.

As way of background, Acumen Fund is a social venture fund which makes debt and equity investments in social enterprises in South Asia and Africa. The companies and organizations that Acumen Fund invests in provide health, housing, water, or energy products and services that serve people who make less than $4/day.

After spending two months in New York for orientation, we (the 7 fellows) will each go our different ways to work with one of Acumen Fund's investees. In mid-November, I will go to Nairobi, Kenya to work with HealthStore Foundation, a non-profit which manages a chain of 70 rural health clinics owned and run by local nurses. I will return from Kenya in July 2007 for a debrief in New York. Read More...