What it takes to make change

A few years ago I found
myself in Kigali, Rwanda

presenting a plan to bring
off-grid solar electricity

to 10 million low-income East Africans.

As I waited to speak
to the President and his ministers,

I thought about how I'd arrived
in that same place 30 years before.

A 25-year-old who left
her career in banking

to co-found the nation's first
microfinance bank

with a small group of Rwandan women.

And that happened just a few months
after women had gained the right

to open a bank account
without their husband's signature.

Just before I got on stage,

a young woman approached me.

"Ms. Novogratz," she said,

"I think you knew my Auntie."

"Really?

What was her name?"

She said, "Felicula."

I could feel tears well.

One of the first women
parliamentarians in the country,

Felicula was a co-founder,

but soon after we'd established the bank,

Felicula was killed in a mysterious
hit-and-run accident.

Some associated her death
to a policy she had sponsored

to abolish bride price,

or the practice of paying a man
for the hand of his daughter in marriage.

I was devastated by her death.

And then a few years after that,

after I'd left hte country,

Rwanda exploded in genocide.

And I have to admit,

there were times when I thought about
all the work so many had done

and I wondered what it had amounted to.

I turned back to the woman.

"I'm sorry, would you tell me
who you are again?"

She said, "Yes, my name is Monique

and I'm the Deputy Governor
of Rwanda's National Bank."

If you had told me when were
just getting started

that within a single generation,

a young woman will go on to help lead
her nation's financial sector,

I'm not sure I would have believed you.

And I understood that I was back
in that same place

to continue work Felicula had started
but could not complete in her lifetime.

And that it was to me to recommit
to dreams so big I might not complete them

in my lifetime.

That night I decided to write
a letter to the next generation

because so many have passed on
their wisdom and knowledge to me,

because I feel a growing sense of urgency

that I might not finish
the work I came to do.

And because I want to pass that forward

to everyone who wants
to create change in this world

in ways that only they can do.

That generation is in the streets.

They're crying urgently
for wholesale change

against racial injustice,

religious and ethnic persecution,

catastrophic climate change

and the cruel inequality

that has left us more divided

and divisive than ever in my lifetime.

But what would I say to them?

I'm a builder,

so I started by focusing
on technical fixes,

but our problems are too interdependent,

too entangled.

We need more than a system shift.

We need a mind shift.

Plato wrote that a country
cultivates what it honors.

For too long, we have defined success
based on money, power and fame.

Now we have to start the hard,
long work of moral revolution.

By that I mean putting our shared humanity

and the sustainability of the earth
at the center of our systems,

and prioritizing the collective we,

not the individual I.

What if each of us gave more
to the world than we took from it?

Everything would change.

Now, cynics might say
that sounds too idealistic,

but cynics don't create the future.

And though I've learned the folly
of unbridled optimism,

I stand with those who hold
to hard-edged hope.

I know that change is possible.

The entrepreneur and change agents
with whom my team and I have worked

have impacted more than 300 million
low-income people,

and sometimes we shaped entire
sectors to include the poor.

But you can't really talk
about moral revolution

without grounding it
in practicality and meaning.

And that requires an entirely
new set of operating principles.

Let me share just three.

The first is moral imagination.

Too often we use the lens
only of our own imagination,

even when designing solutions

for people whose lives are completely
different from our own.

Moral imagination starts by seeing
others as equal to ourselves,

neither above or below us,

neither idealizing or victimizing.

It required immersing
in the lives of others,

understanding the structures
that get in their way,

and being honest about where
they might be holding themselves back.

That requires deep listening
from a place on inquiry,

not certainty.