This book has explored many fascinating ideas, but the most important would be the underlying message of following things through. Jacqueline Novogratz continuously described and ranted about all the projects she had seen in Africa that started with good intentions but completely failed in the long run. This is an issue of sustainability and fully thinking through the project before implementing it on a large scale. Testing that would have shown the projects fail would have been very helpful because the companies implementing the large scale projects could have fixed the problems. This book was written in a biased perspective since the person who wrote it is clearly biased towards Africa being overly underdeveloped, but her main thesis remains strong. This thesis is that even though development is being progressed in Africa, projects that aren't seen all the way through don't help out anyone. If anything, these projects hurt the core side financially and the periphery side through wasting the people's time. Even though this thesis may be exaggerated through the descriptions she uses, the main message about success will always be true. Success can not easily and nonchalantly be achieved. Success is earned through mistakes, grit, hard work, stress, and initiative.
The perspective of this book was written through the perspective of the person who went through the hardship herself. While this is the most interesting perspective, it would have been nice to see the perspective of the people she was affecting, or the perspectives of the people inserting the projects which failed. The perspectives of the large companies inserting projects was given throughout the book, but it was given in a pretty biased view. This is the view that they only have good intentions and don't really think through the project that they are implementing. While this is partly true, the problem that was a result in the project could have just been simply overlooked, but no sympathy was given to these people. The book was written in a very interesting way that represented the feelings of one women very well. Even after saying this, I would still recommend this book because it was fun to read and insightful.