If you're looking at distributing alternative energy in Nigeria, for instance, what gets in your way is not people's ability to pay, not people's desire for a clean solar lamps or biomass opportunities. But there is a strong status quo that really depends on selling diesel.

The poor also are willing to make, and do make, smart decisions, if you give them that opportunity.

By going from the bottom-up again, we see where successes work, and you can also see where the status quo can be the biggest obstacle or roadblock to success. The kind of entrepreneurs in whom we need to invest are the kind who are willing to fight that status quo, bureaucracy, complacency, and corruption.

May each of you live lives of immersion. They won't necessarily be easy lives. But in the end, it is all that will sustain us.

The only way to end poverty, to make it history, is to build viable systems on the ground that deliver critical and affordable goods and services to the poor, in ways that are financially sustainable and scaleable. If we do that, we really can make poverty history.

Philanthropy is no longer about writing a check for $10,000 to the opera.

What we really yearn for as human beings is to be visible.