It's Time to Pick the Next BIF Bookgroup Selection

April is just around the corner and as our discussions around the Invention of Air wind down, it's a good time to select our next book. To start us off, I'd like to suggest Jacqueline Novogratz's recently published The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World.

Jacqueline is a social entrepreneur and the CEO of Acumen Fund, a private equity company she founded in 2001 that has invested in 32 entrepreneurs who are building systems to bring affordable basic services to low income people in India, Pakistan, Kenya and Tanzania. By applying business metrics to philanthropy, she is fundamentally changing the model for catalyzing change in developing countries.

Acumen Fund is not a micro-lender. Its investments range from $300,000 to $2 million and the intent is to create business models that can be duplicated and scaled up. One recent success is A to Z Textile Mills. The Tanzanian company makes insecticide-treated mosquito nets to protect people against malaria. Acumen Fund invested $325,000 to entrepreneur Anuj Shah to help the company set up a factory which today produces more than 15 million bed nets a year. It is now the country's second largest employer; And the investment? Acumen Fund got it back.

A past storyteller from BIF's Collaborative Innovation Summit [watch her story here] Jacqueline's new book is a personal memoir of her quest to understand global poverty and to find powerful new ways of tackling it.

What are your thoughts? Shall we read The Blue Sweater? Post your suggestions here or, even better, join the BIF Bookgroup. And be sure to include the book title, author and a couple of sentences about why you think it makes for a good selection. We'll make our selection this week.