I still feel that the kind of leader I want to be is one that spends time understanding our work in a way that allows me to translate it for policymakers and people who have real access to resources.

I was encouraged to break all the rules but to take the best of philanthropy, the best of investing, and the best of development finance, and experiment with new ways to create this venture capital model of using philanthropy to back patient capital investments, and then build solutions that were measured in terms of the kind of impact and change they were making on people's lives and in the world, not just on the financial return.

Acumen Fund's patient capital investment in Western Seed is intended to enhance the food security and economic independence of Kenya's smallholder farmers.

The human spirit is extraordinary. If we give the 3 billion people who live in poverty the opportunity to change their lives, they will. For too long, we've looked at needing to "save" these people - with an emphasis on "these people" - rather than removing the constraints keeping them from solving their own problems.

My whole life has been spent with people who have taken every knock in the world. No advantages. Yet they greet you with a big smile, they give you what they have, and they keep coming back. They are the fighters.

Each of us can work to change a small portion of events. And it's in the total of all those acts that the history of this generation will be written.

People have to understand that unless social enterprise is experimental, it will not succeed in making a difference.