As I leave the Karachi airport, waiting for my delayed PIA flight to Mumbai, my Twitter feed sends messages of rioting in the streets outside due to the execution of the murderer of Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab who had declared his opposition to Pakistan’s blasphemy law. My feed is also full of celebratory Tweets for Pakistan’s daughter Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy as she’s just won her second Oscar, this time for a documentary short about honor killings. The duality of the messages reminds of the country’s manifold character — bravery, religious fervor, global capabilities, schisms. Here the stakes of rejecting the status quo are real and can be fatal. Yet extraordinary individuals fight for a better world in which all people matter daily.

I’ve experienced the swirl throughout the week and leave feeling hopeful for the future. My first day was spent in Lahore at that beautiful city’s Literary Festival. Though the organizers had to cancel the first day of the festival and switch locations due to terror threats, thousands showed up anyway to celebrate the country’s writers, artists and thinkers. This is a country of resilience and you could feel a defiant stand for freedom, intellectual and physical in every room, in every talk given by so many speakers not only from Pakistan but also India, Germany, Egypt and America. I could not have felt more honored to be a part of it.

We are the stories we tell ourselves. And if we are to tackle poverty effectively, we need a new narrative not only of who the poor are, but also the responsibility of the rich to address a growing economic gap and what a lack of dignity means for all.

We need a better narrative of how interlinked we are, not in intellectual terms but at the most fundamental level. Our actions and inactions impact all of us now. There is no longer a case for us versus them, not that there ever was. There is only a case for us, for we are all we have.

I was struck by Mohsin Hamid’s language around Sufism and its focus on love. He spoke about how the narrative of individualism “isn’t going to get us out of here,” yet how do you hold the dream of love? What is the right balance between the individual and collective? And of course, my favorite talk was with our very own Syed Babar Ali, one of Pakistan’s most respected and revered citizens for all he has done to use his privilege for good.

I met SBA, as everyone affectionately refers to him, on my first trip to Pakistan. He was enthusiastic about Acumen’s mission and our intentions, yet careful to let me know that Pakistanis had seen too many people promising change come and go. “Keep your head down and get something done before you talk about it,” he advised. And so we did. Babar has been a supporter ever since. Listening to his stories of starting out, building his successful company, Packages Limited, starting the Lahore University of Management Studies, a university rivaling the best in the world, sitting on multiple boards and caring about this and the next generation reminded me of his genuineness, his care for Pakistan and his childlike curiosity that keeps him, at 85, one of the youngest people I know. He’s a model for all of us.

From the Lahore Literary Festival, we traveled to the rural areas of Punjab to meet with farmers supported by Acumen investee National Rural Support Program (NRSP), an agricultural microfinance bank. We sat inside a large warehouse where rice is stored to sell when prices peak after the harvest. The farmers, men and women both, spoke fervently about their desire to rid themselves of their dependence on local artis, or middlemen. “We pay them a great amount for money they lend, but that is not the problem. They control the seed and fertilizer and we don’t get it at the right time. They sell our goods whenever they want and we have to accept the price they give. If we need an emergency loan, they will give us that. But we are never free. We stay dependent.”

The supply chain for agriculture is a complicated story. The artis are arguably cogs in a wheel that has turned ceaselessly for centuries. They know the farmers who have no money of their own to pay for the seeds and fertilizers needed to grow crops on whatever small patch of land is theirs by ownership or rental. But the problem is the total dependence on these individuals. They decide what to charge the farmers. They decide when to give them inputs. One farmer said, “It is not just that they make us pay back $30 for fertilizer that costs $20, but that they give it to us when they want — often at the wrong time so that our crops are less productive. They decide when to sell the goods, sometimes at the bottom of the market.” Yes, they provide loans for health emergencies and weddings, but those loans weigh the farmers with more expensive debt. The cycle of dependence is endless.

Dependence and a lack of dignity. The farmers saved their harshest words for the way they felt treated by artis when they were behind in their payments. “They come to our houses and sit on our heads,” a male farmer cried. “They yell so loudly that the neighbors can hear and it embarrasses us. We lose our dignity this way.”

In his 1762 treatise The Social Contract, the philosopher Rousseau writes “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” The farmers of northern Punjab are better off on some accounts than other farmers in the country. We met a number who owned four or five acres, not just one or two like those in the south. Yet, they are not free to make their own choices. They are not free to know that their efforts will be rewarded with any predictable outcome. Because of debt structures and lack of access to affordable, timely inputs, most cannot escape the oppressive cycle of poverty.

I asked the farmers what dignity meant to them. Both men and women shouted fragments that showered us all with hope:

“Being self-sufficient.”

“It shows up in how you feel about yourself.”

And one stated simply, “If there is money, there is dignity.”

With this last one, everybody laughed. The eldest woman, the only one without a child in her arms, shared this Punjabi proverb: “For houses full of grain, even mad family members are considered intelligent.”

As in so many parts of the world, the wealthy rule as the poor are caught in a status quo with little control over their own lives. Our task, then, is not simply to ensure they earn more income, but that we remove the processes that constrict freedoms. The opposite of poverty is not wealth but dignity. Income is just one part of it.

In Karachi, we visited Nizam Energy, one of our newest investments focused on bringing affordable solar systems to the poor. I’m reminded again that entrepreneurs are the best seekers we have to solve tough problems of poverty. The successful entrepreneurs focus their energies on understanding their customers and finding ways to serve their needs. Then they make the capital work for them. They do not start with a focus on profits alone and twist the business and starve the customers to that end.

Ends and means. In an interconnected world, we have to get clearer about that for which we are aiming. If our goal is energy access for all, then what kinds of systems must be put in place to allow that to occur in ways that are financially sustainable in the long-term? And can we give entrepreneurs the glide ramp to test the market, understand their customers, modify solutions from one place to another based on local context?

Usman Ahmed, the company’s driven entrepreneur is obsessed with understanding what solar companies are doing around the world. Constantly testing the market, he is learning what works and what might be different in Pakistan when it comes to serving the poor. In Africa, he says, cellphone chargers are key to selling solar lights. In Pakistan, it is all about the fan. And not just any fan. Many poor Pakistanis want fans that are strong enough to create a breeze that allows the children to sleep through the night, especially during the summer months when the temperature can exceed 50 degrees. When the cold of winter comes, however, some households stop paying, even allowing their systems to be confiscated, hoping to buy a new system when the heat makes life feel unbearable again. Nizam is experimenting with how to create systems that give customers what they need in ways that ensure the company is repaid.

Working with Acumen Fellow Javed Cheema, Usman is also trying to understand how to segment markets within Pakistan. Will people in the north where the air is crisp even in summer prioritize fans? What kind of pay-as-you-go systems will work in rural areas where few have access to mobile banking? And what comes after households have enough energy to power lights, radios, cellphone chargers and fans? Conventional wisdom would say televisions, but the women the company has met are clamoring for irons and washing machines. Pakistanis take their appearance seriously. Urban women pay laundrymen to clean and press their clothes, and many calculate that they could save considerably if they could do these tasks themselves.

We hear this same refrain when we visit a slum where Christians reside near a posh area of Islamabad. Here, people are proud, living literally next door to some of the most expensive homes in the city; yet, despite their proximity to the grid, they’ve no access whatsoever to electricity. In each of the households we visit, the women remind us of how aspirational Pakistanis are. “We have lights now. Now we want to live like the rich people live.”

This is not necessarily the feeling of rural populations. Women in the high mountains in Chitral, many of whom live in very conservative communities, cloistered in their homes, care less about irons and more about televisions. They want to be connected to the world, especially during the winter months when the men work in Peshawar and Islamabad, leaving women and children in isolation in the mountains.

The market may be the best listening device we have: it behooves producers to understand the different desires of its customers and try to meet their needs, not in a paternalistic way but one that, if successful, is built on trust and the ethos of service.

Outside the slum, as the sun sets, we pass a public park. There, Master Ayub, famous for volunteering for more than a quarter century to educate the city’s low-income children is always found with scores of students around him. On this night there were at least 200 students, starting from five years of age. Many are clustered in groups in front of 14- or 15 year-olds, mostly women, who stand as teachers, doing their best to teach, to mentor, to inspire. These same young women will learn from older teachers once the young ones have gone home for the evening. The youngsters sit on the concrete ground besides books and papers, writing or sketching in notebooks, few of them talking to one another, most assiduously concentrating.

Master Ayub has a few solar lights to enable small groups to study, but he could use a few street lights given the public service he is giving to the community. Just imagining it frees the mind to understand how critical clean, affordable energy is to unleashing human capabilities in profound ways. I look at the hundreds of young people, each of them filled with unlimited potential, undaunted by the lack of a traditional classroom or teacher or even time for school. Yet they couldn’t be more serious, more focused on learning, their only real hope for changing their own lives in ways that would give them more control.

Over the week, I also spent time with our Acumen Fellows. We had an education roundtable in which it became clear that a new generation of educational leaders is rising. They stand on the shoulders of giants who have sacrificed much to bring education to children who have been fully left out of the system. At the same time, the next generation is experimenting with using technology, videos, a deeper focus on building character rather than teaching only the basics on which students are tested.

We also met with fellows from northern Pakistan whose preoccupation understandably is security. “Given the violence toward schools in Peshawar, we had no choice but to place high security at the school,” one fellow said. “We have a dozen security guards with guns around the premises and on the roof. Imagine, parents used to want to know about the quality of education we provided. Today, all of their questions concern the security precautions we’ve taken as a school. We have so much fear that we care less about what the children learn.”

Safety and order are necessary for peace. But we cannot define peace simply as the absence of violence or war. Those children who are attending schools with snipers on the rooftops, who must pass through security barriers and walk by soldiers holding machine guns must feel a sense of anxiety running through their veins. What does this do to their attention spans? Their understanding of themselves in the wider society? Their ability to trust others fully? A state of fear in which we depend on police and military primarily for order is not good for anyone. Countering it requires finding mechanisms and examples for hope.

This is where the work begins. The good news is that we now have 70 fellows in Pakistan doing extraordinary things for the good of their country. They are experimenting and innovating in education, healthcare, energy and agriculture. They are curious to know one another across lines of religion and race and class and ethnic tribe. They are willing to listen to others. And they hold the hope of the country within themselves.

I leave Pakistan more hopeful than I have in a longtime, largely because of our fellows, the team, our advisors. This is a moment for urgency and focus, yes. It is also a moment to recognize not only that change is possible but that change is occurring. And it is within our collective hands.