 I'm Jacqueline Novigratz, and I am thrilled to be at SoCAP. There's never been a time for such a gathering like this one, because the world is facing four ultimata simultaneously. The threat of catastrophic climate crisis, severe inequality, growing divides within and among our nations, and a lack of consensus about what is true. This is a time where we all have to step back and reimagine our systems to move profit from the center of everything and insist upon putting our shared humanity and the sustainability of the earth there. It's also a time for each of us to step back and ask, what more can we ourselves do? At Acumen, we've been asking questions like these for many years. We actually started in 2001 because we believed that there was a better way to solve sticky issues of poverty, than simply focusing on using philanthropy or on traditional investment. At the center of our idea was patient capital. Now, many talk about impact-first capital or catalytic capital. For Acumen, patient capital is decidedly philanthropic-backed long-term investment in companies that we would commit to a company. And we would measure not only our financial returns, but our impact using tools like Lean Data, any money that came back to Acumen, we would reinvest in other innovation for the poor. And in the early years, we would say to our donors, our partners, that we wouldn't give them money back, we would give them change, but that we believed so deeply in using the tools of investment and using investment that our expectation on the financial side was that while we'd see outsized impact, so could we hope to get somewhere between zero and market returns on our investments. We turned 20 during the pandemic, and we decided that this was the time to ask ourselves, what worked, what didn't work, what could we do better in this next chapter? And so we decided to do a look back of our investing. Now, we only have a small snapshot and we're at the beginning stages, but we wanted to share some of the lessons with you. Over the past 20 years, if you exclude the grants we've made and the investments we've made from our for-profit funds, Acumen has invested $132 million in 149 companies across 13 nations and eight sectors. We've learned a lot through both successes and failures. We've learned some of the sectors that are really difficult for investors like primary healthcare and safe drinking water. And in other areas, we've seen entire new industries being built. These companies have brought critical goods and services to over 400 million individuals across the planet, and that's a conservative number. We know that there's a lot to unpack in the impact story of those 400 million. And yet today, what we really wanna talk about is the financial expenses. What it means to invest in very difficult markets to build new things, because what's wrong with the world right now is too much of our capital is flowing to the safer places when what we really need to do is insist on that capital flowing to where the needs are greatest. And so to really be conservative and understand what has happened with our investment portfolio, we decided again to take a smaller cut. We would not only now exclude grants and investments made from our for-profit funds, but we would exclude the past six years and look at the earlier, the first 15 years of investing because in an investor's life, the happiest day is probably the day after you've made an investment. And in the early years, we often have outsized expectations of what our investments would yield on the financial and the impact side. And so we really wanted to look at the reality of companies that were five, six, seven, 10, 12 years old. That group of companies represents about $100 million invested across 97 companies, again in eight sectors across the world. And together it has yielded about 0.86 multiples. In other words, for every dollar we invest, we assume we'll get about 86 cents back across the portfolio. Now, from a philanthropic perspective, the question then is why do we lose 14 cents for every dollar that we invest? On the other hand, what impact are we getting for that 14 cents? And we think it is far greater even than the way that we've been able to measure our impact. It also makes us take very seriously the realities of the environments in which our companies are operating. If you look across our 20 most profitable companies, the average expected return is 2.2 X. And these companies take a long time to exit. And in fact, we've gotten a lot more strategic and flexible and creative about the way that we're structuring our investment so that we don't have to rely on the capital markets for exits, but are finding other ways, including enabling local employees and companies to buy us out so that we can transfer ownership for a more inclusive economy. So sometimes when we hear phrases like there are no financial trade-offs between, there are no trade-offs between financial impact and social impact or everything is a win-win. What I have to conclude is that that reinforces the way that our capital too often moves to safer places where we can do good, but not necessarily solve our toughest problems. What's needed is to move our capital to those tougher places. And they are tough. One of the reasons that we need philanthropy in this space of patient capital is because the customers of our companies are very poor. They make just a couple of few dollars a day. There's very weak infrastructure. It costs more to transfer a ton of cocoa from Freetown Sierra Leone to a city a couple hundred kilometers away than it does to transfer that same ton from Freetown to Europe. When I talk about disruptive shocks, we're talking about massive shocks overnight full devaluations of currency, political instability, not to mention climate crisis, climate shocks. In a single year, you could see floods, droughts, locust swarms seriously impacting companies that are serving some of the poorest farmers on earth. In these areas, it's difficult for our companies to hire the right set of skills. Trust is limited and corruption is prevalent. When we look at the amount of impaired or written down investment, we attribute about 7.8 million of it to corruption. And yet for that 14 cents, we have seen truly outsized impact in ways that we hadn't imagined at the beginning because not only are we able to see now how patient capital investing can build companies that are both profitable and impact millions of people, but as I said, change entire systems, structures, local economies. I wanna talk about a few of them. There are four areas where patient capital most uniquely plays an important role. And I'm gonna go through them one by one. The first is in building new markets. For instance, in 2006, 1.5 billion people on the planet had no access to electricity. That's when Delight came onto the scene with this idea that they could sell off-grid solar light and electricity to very low-income people. Like Acumen at the beginning, they didn't fully understand what this business would look like. They had to understand how to finance and price it and distribute it and ultimately do all of that themselves. Over the last 14 years, Acumen has not only a company Delight but has invested in many other companies that have made us the largest off-grid solar investor for the poor in the world. Today, 30% of all people who have gotten access to light and electricity off-grid through solar are customers of Acumen's companies. That's what patient capital has the capacity to do. Second is creating blueprints for public goods. When we started like so many social entrepreneurs, we had the conceit that when government was failing, social entrepreneurs could find the answer to bringing critical goods and services to low-income people. But the reality is that while markets are indeed a listening device, by coming in with entrepreneurs and with market-driven models, we could find out where the markets worked and also where they failed. A company like Sanergy started off that way. This is a company that was taking on and is taking on the sanitation crisis. One in three human beings on the planet have no access to a toilet. So Sanergy started by finding entrepreneurs to build toilets over time. They realized that only when they looked at the whole system of sanitation could they actually solve the problem and now have a hybrid model and are partnering with philanthropists as well as with government. And we can see a real blueprint for how to solve this problem at scale. The third is creating market inequities. A full third to a half of people on earth have for too long been overlooked, underestimated and too often exploited. We talk about inclusive supply chains and how we have to reimagine capitalism but we see too few real examples. Supporting those entrepreneurs that are actually doing that work requires a different kind of capital. It requires philanthropic backpatient capital. Look at the coffee and the chocolate industries where so many farmers can't even cover the cost of production and they have no voice themselves to negotiate. So a company like Azahar starts with the farmers understands the production costs, partners with the farmers so the farmers can use their own voices, builds a transparent supply chain and has now a blueprint again for how we might actually create a more sustainable and just supply chain that works for all parties that someone has to give and for too long it's been the farmers that have given. And finally, patient capital for strengthening fragile economies, local economies that suffer massive shocks either through war or violence or natural disaster require a time when charity and aid come in just to help people survive but then they need to rebuild economies, rebuild trust, rebuild skills. Again, that requires a blend of different kinds of capital including philanthropy. Patient capital has an important role to play in Northern Uganda, the community of over 2 million people lived for 30 years and internally displaced persons camps. When all of those people came back to Gulu they were in that same position without skills, without resources, without trust. GADC created a cotton gin that could provide those skills, enable farmers to get implements, connect them to a larger economy so that they could build one of their own and when you go to see a half million people sending their children to school and flourishing you see the power of patient capital. 20 years ago, we didn't have an impact investing sector just imagine and think about all of that this community has been able to do to contribute, to learn. And as I said, the one thing we definitely have learned is that when we talk about no trade-offs when we talk about win-win it makes it too easy to let capital flow to the safer parts. This is a moment to see it move to the more daring areas. You know, I talked about bringing light and electricity to 30% of people who have it on earth today because of off-grid solar. That experience has given us a sight line to what it would actually take to realize that a sustainable development goal seven or universal electrification which may be the only goal we realistically have a chance to nail. But to do that requires bringing light and electricity to the 230 million hardest to reach people on the planet and that will not happen with business as usual. It will require grant money, concessionary debt other forms of creative capital and accompaniment but it's possible. It's within our grasp. For us to heal the world requires that we all focus on what we can give. Of the four ultimata inequality has not only helped divide us but it's left us in a situation where we have more capital more investment capital and more philanthropy available than ever in our lifetime. This is a moment to let it flow to those places where we can dare to solve problems to use investment as a means, patient capital or using that capital that expects a financial return between zero and market but insists on outside social impact is one way but we need more sophistication, more creativity more flexibility from within this community. And if there were a community that has the capability and the resources to change and to solve the toughest problems of our time, it is this one. So if not us, who and if not now, when? Because this is about dignity, not just for some but for all of us, thank you.