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 cofound 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 cofounder,

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 the 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
we 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 mine.

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 are 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 entrepreneurs and change agents
with whom my team and I have worked

have impacted more than 300 million
low-income people,

and sometimes reshaped
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 nor below us,

neither idealizing nor victimizing.

It requires 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 of inquiry,

not certainty.

Several years ago I sat
with a group of women weavers

outside in a rural village in Pakistan.

The day was hot ...

over 120 degrees in the shade.

I wanted to tell the women about
a company my organization had invested in

that was bringing solar light to millions
of people across India and East Africa,

and I had seen the transformative
power of that light

to allow people to do things so many
of us just take for granted.

"We have this light" I said,

"costs about seven dollars.

People say it's amazing.

If we could convince the company
to bring those products to Pakistan,

would you all be interested?"

The women stared,

and then a big woman whose hands
knew hard work looked at me,

wiped the sweat off her face and said,

"We don't want a light.

We're hot.

Bring us a fan."

"Fan," I said.

"We don't have a fan.

We have a light.

But if you had this light,

your kids can study at night,

you can work more -- "

she cut me off.

"We work enough.

We're hot.

Bring us a fan."

That straight-talking conversation
deepened my moral imaginaton.

And I remember lying --

sweltering in my bed
in my tiny guest house that night,

so grateful for the clickety-clack
of the fan overhead.

And I thought, "Of course.

Electricity.

A fan.

Dignity."

And when I now visit our companies

who've reached over 100
million people with light and electricity

and it's a really hot place,

and if there's a rooftop system,

there is also a fan.

But moral imagination is also needed
to rebuild and heal our countries.

My nation is roiling
as it finally confronts

what it's not wanted to see.

It would be impossible to deny
the legacy of American slavery

if all of us truly immersed
in the lives of Black people.

Every nation begins the process of healing

when its people begin to see each other

and to understand that it is in that work
that are planted the seeds

of our individual
and collective transformation.

Now that requires acknowledging
the light and shadow,

the good and evil that exist
in every human being.

In our world we have to learn
to partner with those

even whom we consider our adversaries.

This leads to the second princple:

holding opposing values in tension.

Too many of our leaders today
stand on one corner or the other,

shouting.

Moral leaders reject
the wall of either-or.

They're willing to acknowlege a truth
or even a partial truth

in what the other side believes.

And they gain trust by making
pricinpled decisions

in service of other people,

not themselves.

To succeed in my work has required
holding the tension

between the power of markets
to enable innovation and prosperity,

and their peril to allow for exclusion

and sometimes exploitation.

Those who see the sole purpose
of business as profit

are not comfortable with that tension,

nor are those who have no trust
in business at all.

But standing on either side
negates the creative, generative potential

of learning to use markets
without being seduced my them.

Take chocolate.

It's a hundred-billion-dollar industry

dependent on the labor of about
five million smallholder farming families

who receive only a tiny fraction
of that 100 billion.

In fact, 90 percent of them make
under two dollars a day.

But there's a generation
of new entrepreneurs

that is trying to change that.

They start by understanding
the production costs of the farmers.

They agree to a price that allows
the farmers to actually earn income

in a way that will sustain their lives.

Sometimes including revenue-share
and ownership models,

building a community of trust.

Now are these companies as profitable

as those that focus
solely on shareholder value?

Possibly not in the short term.

But these entrepreneurs
are focused on solving problems.

They're tired of easy slogans
like "doing well by doing good."

They know they have to be
financially sustainable

and they are insisting on including
the poor and the vulnerable

in their definition of success.

And that brings me to the third principle:

accompaniment.

It's actually a Jesuit term
that means to walk alongside:

I'll hold a mirror to you,

help you see your potential,

maybe more than you see it yourself.

I'll take on your problem
but I can't solve it for you --

that you have to learn to do.

For example, in Harlem
there's an organization

called City Health Works
that hires local residents

with no previous health care experience,

trains them to work with other residents

so that they can better control
chronic diseases like gout,

hypertension,

diabetes.

I had the great pleasure
of meeting Destini Belton,

one of the health workers,

who explained her job to me.

She said that she checks in on clients,

checks their vital signs,

takes them grocery shopping,

goes on long walks,

has conversations.

She told me, "I let them know
somebody has their back."

And the results have been astounding.

Patients are healthier,

hospitals less burdened.

As for Destini,

she tells me her family
and she are healthier.

And, she adds, "I love that I get
to contribute to my community."

All of us yearn to be seen,

to count.

The work of change,

of moral revolution,

is hard.

But we don't change in the easy times.

We change in the difficult times.

In fact, I've come to see discomfort
as a proxy for progress.

But there's one more thing.

There's something I wish I'd known
when I was just starting out

so many years ago.

No matter how hard it gets,

there's always beauty to be found.

I remember now what seems
a long time ago,

spending an entire day talking
to woman after woman

in the Mathare Valley slum
in Nairobi, Kenya.

I listened to their stories
of struggle and survival

as they talked about losing children,

of fighting violence and hunger,

sometimes feeling like
they wouldn't even survive.

And right before I left,

a huge rainstorm poured down.

And I was sitting in my little car
as the wheels stuck in the mud

thinking I'm never getting out of here,

when suddenly there was
a tap on my window --

a woman who was beckoning
me to follow her,

and I did.

Jumped out through the rainstorm,

we went down this little muddy path,

through a rickety metal door,

inside a shack

where a group of women
were dancing with abandon.

I jumped in and found myself lost
in the rhythm and the color and the smiles

and suddenly I realized

this is what we do as human beings.

When we're broken,

when we feel that we are failing
or are in despair,

we dance.

We sing.

We pray.

Beauty resides too in showing up,

in paying attention,

in being kind when we feel
like being anything but kind.

Look at the explosion of art
and music and poetry

in this moment of our collective crisis.

It is in the darkest times

that we have the chance
to find our deepest beauty.

So let this be our moment

to move forward

with the fierce urgency
of a new generation

fortified with our most profound
and collective wisdom.

And ask yourself:

what can you do with the rest of today

and the rest of your life

to give back more
to the world than you take?

Thank you.