Jessica Jackley - Clay Water Brick: Finding Inspiration from Entrepreneurs Who Do the Most with the Least

Clay Water Brick is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.

Copyright 2015 by Jessica Jackley

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

R ANDOM H OUSE and the H OUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jackley, Jessica.

Clay water brick : finding inspiration from entrepreneurs who do the most with the least / by Jessica Jackley.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-679-64376-0

eBook ISBN 978-0-679-64378-4

1. Jackley, Jessica. 2. BusinesspeopleCase studies.

3. EntrepreneurshipCase studies. I. Title.

HB615.J27 2015

338.040922dc23 2014036552

Ebook ISBN9780679643784

www.randomhousebooks.com

eBook design adapted from printed book design by Caroline Cunningham

Cover design: Gabriele Wilson

Cover photographs: provided by Kiva to advance its mission of connecting people around the world through lending to alleviate poverty

a_rh_4.1_c0_r1

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

BY JEFFREY D. SACHS

The world needs you, Jessica Jackley tells her readers. This is true. But it is also true that the world needs Jessica Jackley. She is very special: compassionate, bold, empathetic, ready to learn, and willing to fail, and she possesses the enormous talents necessary to succeed in world-changing ways. The co-founder of Kiva and other innovative endeavors to fight poverty and champion entrepreneurs, Jackley is an inspiration, and her moving account of her lifelong efforts to improve the world will inspire countless others to follow in her path.

Jackleys book is a very special case studyin fact, an autobiographical ruminationon entrepreneurship: her own, plus the inspiring entrepreneurs she has met along the way, from Silicon Valley to impoverished villages of East Africa and beyond. She tells her story and theirs with flair, remarkable honesty, at times piercing humor, and shrewd insights. We are watching a wonderful entrepreneur, and a great storyteller, at work. For Jackley is forging a path all her own and takes us along on her incredible journey. It is as if we are following the traveler in Robert Frosts great poem, who took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

As she explains, Jackley was a most unlikely entrepreneur, at least in the conventional sense of the term. She was not a business school hotshot (at least not at first). She was not aiming to make a personal fortune with the latest killer app. She had never run a business. What she did do, however, was listen carefully in Sunday school when she first heard how Jesus called upon his followers to help the least among them. And she listened carefully once again when she heard Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus describe the possibilities of microfinance. Arriving at Stanford University as a young staffer, Jackley combined her deep moral commitments, Yunuss insights, and Silicon Valleys entrepreneurial zest to invent a wholly new force for fighting poverty: crowdsourced microfinance in the now-famous social enterprise, Kiva.

As Jackley makes clear, Kiva was anything but a straight shot to success. Her main point, perhaps, is that entrepreneurship is rarely that way. She and her co-founder invent, test, learn, fail, reinvent, and continue to move forward throughout the early days of Kivas existence, and she does the same as the next decade of her career unfolds. Jackley seems to embody one of Silicon Valleys most important features: the drive for success coupled with the absence of fear of failureor at least the ability to keep such fear under wraps. Kiva eventually triumphs, though not without personal and professional costs along the way, all movingly described by Jackley in a way that keeps the reader both riveted and vicariously educated.

As remarkable as Jackleys experiences are the insights she gleans from the wonderful businesswomen and -men she meets and helps along the way. Most are people living in dire rural poverty almost unimaginable in the United States, yet with personal character, drive, and resilience that offer us great inspiration and life lessons. Jackley is inimitable in sharing their experiences with tenderness, concision, and insight: a treasure trove for young entrepreneurs who will be inspired to join the growing legions engaged in ending poverty in our time.

During the past fifteen years, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have been the worlds guideposts for fighting poverty. MDG 1 called for poverty in the developing countries to be cut by half between 1990 and 2015. That has happened. The reasons for success are many, both macroeconomic and microeconomic, and the advent of financial inclusion and microbusiness in the Internet age has played its role.

We are now entering the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) era, in which SDG 1 will be to end extreme poverty in the coming generation. Once again, both macro and micro interventions will be needed for success. Large-scale investments in infrastructure, health systems, and education systems will need to be combined with millions upon millions of start-up companies across Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

The information revolution will give local entrepreneurs new tools and empowerment to get the job done. When they build their businesses, tap into capital markets, and create new applications to address local needs, they will be following in the path that Muhammad Yunus and Jessica Jackley have helped to chart. And when millions of todays young people take up the thrilling task of being the generation that finally ends the ancient scourge of extreme poverty, they will do well to draw from the heart, soul, and mind of Jessica Jackley. This wonderful book will be a companion for countless new young leaders in the fight against poverty in the years ahead.

J EFFREY D. S ACHS is Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, Special Advisor to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon on the Millennium Development Goals, and author of The End of Poverty (2005) and other works.

Patrick the Brickmaker

SOMETHING FROM NOTHING

Eastern Uganda

2004

Patrick didnt have much. As a boy, he lost most of his family when a militant rebel group attacked his village in northern Uganda. He and his younger brother fled the only home they had ever known and headed south. Patrick was unsure where they would end up, but after weeks of traveling they settled in a village near the Uganda-Kenya border, where they came across some distant cousins. They wanted to be as close as they could to familyany family at all.

Patrick and his brother had no home, no food, no money, not even shoes on their feet. They were young, orphaned, uneducated, homeless, and hungry.

It would have been easy for Patrick to look at his life and count the things he had lost. It would have been easy for him to view himself as a helpless victim, as someone who had been dealt too much injustice, suffered too much loss, and experienced too much pain to fight for a better life for himself. He could have assumed that because he had nothing, he was nothingand would never become more.

But one morning Patrick made a simple decision that changed everything.

Sitting on the ground, watching the sun rise as he leaned against the side of the mud structure where he slept, he wondered, as he did every morning, whether he would eat that day. He rested his hand on the warm, dry earth. His gaze shifted from the sky to his hand, and he stared at the ground beneath his fingers. An idea began to take shape. In a moment of inspiration, he rolled up his sleeves and he began to dig.