Acumen

What started with 400 rupees and a borrowed football is now one of India's most powerful education movements.

Acumen Fellow Ashok Rathod grew up in Ambedkar Nagar, Mumbai, watching his friends drop out of school and fall into gangs. He believed football could change that, and he was right.

Through the OSCAR Foundation, Ashok has reached more than 40,000 children using two deceptively simple rules: celebrate every goal together (to break down division), and no school, no football (to keep kids in class).

Six years of rejection from parents before he formed a single girls' team. Today, 42% of his program is girls, and they're champions.
This is what it looks like when one person refuses to accept the way things are.

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Earlier this month, our New York office had the pleasure of hosting Nidhi Pant, Acumen India Fellow and Co-Founder of Acumen investee S4S Technologies, for a brown bag session that left us galvanized and inspired.

Nidhi and her team use solar conductor dryers to help smallholder farmers in India turn food waste into income. The company also trains women farmers to become micro-entrepreneurs and facilitates access to finance to catalyze underserved markets.

In addition, S4S provides market linkages that help reduce food waste and allow farmers to increase income. S4S has notably created jobs for more than 2000 women, catalyzed millions of dollars in financing, and provided market linkage to over 6000 farmers.

We’re so grateful for your visit, Nidhi. Thank you for sharing your work with us.

There are more refugees today than at any time in human history.

As humanitarian aid continues to shrink, a new wave of entrepreneurs is rising to meet the challenges, building clean energy solutions, digital infrastructure, and market access in their own communities.

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We are living in a moment when more impact capital exists than ever before. And yet, too much of it still isn’t reaching the people who need it most.

As traditional aid declines, more organizations are turning to investment. But too often, that capital bypasses low-income communities where the need is greatest.

In a letter on the state of impact investing, Jacqueline Novogratz reflects on 25 years of investing, what we’ve learned, and what it will take to ensure this capital delivers on its promise.

Impact Capital at a Crossroads Jacqueline Novogratz reflects on 25 years of impact investing and makes the case for what's needed to ensure capital reaches the world's most overlooked communities.

Acumen's founder and CEO Jacqueline Novogratz received a 2026 Lotus Leadership Award from The Asia Foundation for her work in ensuring that investment opens doors for women.

At Acumen, we’re proud to invest in entrepreneurs who are proving that when you invest in women, you invest in everything they'll build around them. Economic opportunity for women changes the equation for their families and entire communities.

Congratulations to Jacqueline and all of this year's honorees.

The astronauts from Artemis II are back on Earth with a powerful message about teams.

"A crew is a group that is in it all the time...and a crew is inescapably, beautifully, dutifully linked," said Christina Koch.

It took a whole lot of people to get four people the farthest distance from Earth that humans have ever travelled.

And it has taken many people for Acumen to reach more than 700 million people living in poverty.

Our entrepreneurs, fellows, peer investors, and philanthropists have never had a clear path to progress, but have continued to build systems that actually work for people too often overlooked.

Because of 25 years of teamwork, 359 million more people have access to clean energy, 964,000 jobs have been created or improved, and 38 million farmers have better livelihoods.

That's what real moonshots look like.

Thank you to our global crew.

Photo Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls/Joel Kowsky. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0:
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acumen Fellows are at TED in Vancouver this week, joining global conversations under the theme “All of Us”.

They are here as leaders working across different sectors in underserved communities.

They will connect lived experience with global ideas and take what they learn back into their work at home.