BusinessTN

Over his 30-plus-year corporate career (mainly with California-based intermodal transport giant Maersk Sealand), William Hargraves has traveled the world developing standards for the movement of perishable commodities and serving internationally as a food safety adviser.

Hargraves’ work has led him to some of the poorest nations on Earth, where he has experienced firsthand how limited governmental and humanitarian organizations are in their efforts to stimulate economies. Why? Primarily, Hargraves says, their Band-Aid approach provides no long-term cures and, perhaps worse, stymies entrepreneurialism. “You’ve got to sort out the leaders, the doers and the followers, and invest accordingly,” Hargraves says. “Aid, by contrast, is a money grab. It just disappears.”

Today based in Nashville (where his daughter and her musician-husband live), Hargraves has started a 501C3, “Global Help Initiative,” intended to spur economic activity in Malawi, a densely populated African nation where the life expectancy is 41 years, infant mortality rates top 10% and a quarter of the 14 million population verge on starvation. How? By unleashing the power of free enterprise employing a venture capital model.

Malawi, a country that until 1993 was led by a graduate of Nashville-based Meharry Medical College, also struggles with the scourge of the fast-growing hyacinth, a water weed that covers lakes, kills fish, hampers boat travel and disrupts the country’s power supply (not to mention provides camouflage for hungry alligators). Commercial uses, however, include paper, livestock feed, and even biofuel. Hargraves wants to harness that commercial potential to forge a new Malawian economy. Using the advice of Nashville business adviser Tim Cummings (son of the former owner of Cummings Sign in Nashville), Hargraves is raising a “social enterprise” fund and expects to soon begin accepting and evaluating business plans from Malawi’s entrepreneurial class. (Hargraves’ nonprofit will serve as a conduit for donations, business loans and no-strings-attached venture capital funding to seed profit-making enterprises.) “We’d like to match humanitarian end-use products with high-end stuff like rattan-like furniture so that together under one corporate umbrella it will be profitable, even if it has a loss leader,” Hargraves explains.

Hargraves will re-invest profits in new ventures—not in paying back investors—though eventually the fund, like the people of Malawi, will be weaned from dependence on ever-additional injections of capital. He’s confidant his proposal will work. Consider Bangladesh, Hargraves argues, where the Mennonite Central Committee is currently helping natives make and market environmentally friendly furniture constructed from hyacinth.

Hargraves spent part of the past year in Iraq helping to build that country’s agricultural system. He believes the same venture capital model he proposes for Malawi would be a better fit than the current U.S. policy in Iraq—that is if the desired outcome is sustainability. In short, where religious organizations and government agencies have not feared to tread, Hargraves believes it’s time a for a venture capital model to get its shot at solving some of the world’s most dire problems.