Jacqueline Novogratz speaks at the 2025 Forbes Sustainability Leaders Summit, New York Sept. 22.
Getty Images
The average American household uses 11,000 kilowatthours of power each year. And yet around the world half a billion people still live without electricity. The deprivation is most acute in sub-Saharan Africa; where according to the World Bank only 16% of people in Malawi, 22% in Burkina Faso and 36% in Sierra Leone can turn the lights on.
Two years ago Jacqueline Novogratz and her venture capital firm Acumen set out to change that, launching the Hardest-to-Reach Initiative — a plan to electrify 70 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, mostly via off-grid solar power.
Today Acumen announced that it has raised $300 million for this effort from a varied consortium of international investors. Backers include Green Climate Fund, IFC, Shinhan Bank, Nordic Development Fund and Soros Economic Development Fund.
“To catalyze new markets that don’t exist, like in Malawi, where no investors are going in — this requires philanthropically backed capital,” says Novogratz, 64, who has directed Acumen in deploying some $500 million over 24 years.
Indeed, this is risky stuff. Acumen’s recent investments have included $2 million for Malawi startup Yellow, which sells solar-powered lights; $1.25 million for Zambian home-solar provider RDG Collective; and $1 million in Sharia-compliant solar-system funding for KIMS Microfinance in Somalia, where only half the population has electricity.
Building solar systems with Yellow in Malawi.
Acumen
Of Acumen’s fundraising, some $200 million will back H2R Amplify, which provides growth capital, mostly in the form of loans with terms that link repayment to social impact. Another $60 million supports H2R Catalyze, a “market-building” facility offering up a mix of equity, debt, grants and technical assistance.
Such flexible options are vital now more than ever, says Novogratz, given the Trump Administration’s erasure this year of USAID. “It was a great soft power,” she says, and the end of Uncle Sam’s foreign aid efforts leaves a void to be filled. “This is the moment to build the new financial models of the post-aid world.”
Some Acumen investors backing the riskiest tranches (such as Nordic Development Fund) don’t expect to see their capital returned. But instead of just giving handouts, Novogratz stresses that in order to incentivize an ecosystem of entrepreneurialism, “It’s clear that investment models are the right way to go.”
A lesson Novogratz has learned over two decades traversing the globe in search of entrepeneurs with vision and passion: truly free markets are few and far between. “When you’re young and you think you’re going to change the world, no one tells you that you’re working in markets of the poor which are political economies, they are not market economies,” says Novogratz. This means that in these hardest-to-reach regions it has too often been USAID, NGOs, organized crime, and churches picking the economic winners — rather than customers voting with their wallets.
She respects the entrepreneurs who emerge in these countires, such as Jawad Aslam, a former “Acumen fellow” in Pakistan who started working with Novogratz’ team in 2008, dedicated himself to providing low-income housing, and is now CEO of the profitable Ansaar Management Company, providing thousands of units of low-income housing.
Says Novogratz, “they have learned that if you are smart enough and courageous enough and stay in the game, you win and change happens.”