Nuru Founder Jake Harriman identifies proven poverty-reduction programs and aims to take them to scale. (Photo courtesy of Nuru International) 

Jake Harriman’s story reads like a screenplay: Decorated military officer has epiphany during combat and devotes life to humanitarian work. It’s all true, except that there’s no script for Harriman to follow as he fights a war on extreme poverty.

After serving seven years in the United States Marine Corps, Harriman became “hell-bent on the mission” of eradicating the roots of poverty. In Iraq and elsewhere, he saw poor people driven to desperate measures— including terrorism—because they were “stripped of choices.” Realizing that one-sixth of the world’s population lives under dire economic conditions, he says, “I just got really angry and wanted to try something different.”

That something became Nuru International, the nonprofit Harriman founded while earning an MBA at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. With $450,000 in startup funds that he raised from classmates, professors, and Silicon Valley backers, he headed to rural Kenya in 2008 to bring a holistic approach to development.

Nuru doesn’t aim to be the biggest innovator in the developing world. Instead, the young organization implements good ideas others have designed and are ready to scale up. “We act as general contractor,” Harriman explains, by rolling out proven programs in five core areas: agriculture, water and sanitation, health care, education, and community economic development.

These areas echo the approach of the Millennium Villages project, a multimillion-dollar antipoverty initiative under way in 10 African nations. Nuru, starting with one pilot site in Kuria, Kenya, hopes to make its impact with a minimum of Western aid. The plan calls for Nuru to exit a community after five years, leaving behind “a completely self-sustaining model that’s continuing to grow to have national impact,” Harriman says. By his projections, one successful site should generate enough revenue to start two more.

By operating as general contractor, Nuru also hopes to integrate programs that often wind up in silos. “Together, these programs can achieve even greater impact than they could in isolation,” Harriman says.

To boost crop production, for example, Nuru uses the model developed by One Acre Fund. Harriman interned with One Acre Fund during business school and saw African families grow their way out of poverty by using better farming methods. By borrowing that model, Nuru gets a faster start on improving agriculture at its pilot site and One Acre Fund scales up more quickly without adding staff or investing new resources.

This approach earns praise from Kevin Starr, managing director of the Mulago Foundation, which invests in scalable solutions across several sectors. “I had long hoped to see a viable, holistic solution to development that would capitalize on synergies,” Starr says. One Acre Fund and Living Goods, two of the programs that Nuru is implementing in Kenya, are also in Mulago’s portfolio. In June, the foundation decided to fund Nuru as well.

That vote of confidence doesn’t mean Nuru has figured out all the answers. Finding solutions that are ready to scale is challenging, Starr admits, and implementing another organization’s model adds unexpected complexities. “They may have underestimated the difficulty,” he says, “but they’re innovative enough to keep us interested.”

Leadership development is one area where Nuru has forged its own model, drawing on Harriman’s battle-tested insights plus theories from other fields. “We scoured sectors to find out how people lead in the developing world, at Goldman Sachs, on the football field, as heads of state,” he says. The result is a training program for service-minded leaders who are carefully recruited from their communities.

The ultimate goal is to bring Nuru to the world’s most troubled spots. “Failed states, conflict zones, volatile environments—we want to go there to reach the last, the least, the forgotten,” Harriman says. Where others see despair, he smells opportunity. When it comes to seeding hope in volatile places like Afghanistan or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, he adds, “there’s a real gap in the market.”

Read more stories by Suzie Boss.