By: Stefanie Gordon
October/November 2008
Across India, poor families have scant access to safe drinking water, but in the town of Akividu, a firm called WaterHealth International had an idea how to address that predicament. The company wanted to build community water systems, each of which would inexpensively supply purified H2O to more than 80,000 people. But like any startup with an idea as big as its bank account is small, WaterHealth needed an infusion of seed capital.
Help would come in 2004 from an unlikely source half a world away, when the New York–based Acumen Fund agreed to make a $600,000 equity investment. Even more unlikely: In exchange for its money, Acumen wanted nothing in return -- except clean water.
Structured like a venture-capital fund, albeit minus the emphasis on ROI, Acumen is an innovative nonprofit founded in 2001 by Jacqueline Novogratz, a globetrotting former commercial banker at Chase Manhattan. Her idea was to scour the emerging world for promising NPOs and for-profit businesses with a moral bent, then provide them with funding.
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