Kate Grant offers a fresh, satisfying story about the positive impact one workaholic nonprofit leader can have on the world.

Here, Grant deftly describes her adventurous, unorthodox journey, while giving an insider’s look at the international aid environment where she has operated for decades and recently led the U.S.-based Fistula Foundation to remarkable success.

Disillusioned by her job on Madison Avenue  in the ‘80s, Grant headed to Princeton to earn a Master of Public Affairs degree and then to Africa to implement USAID-funded health projects.

Her expert storytelling quashes any reader’s potential unease about the population she serves: the estimated 2 million women who suffer from fistula, an injury inflicted by prolonged labor on the mother’s perineum, resulting in holes in the body, incontinence and shame. The injury is unusual in the West, where women receive a C-section when labor is protracted. But it’s common in places like sub-Saharan Africa, where prenatal care is rare and women usually labor with untrained help. Nonprofits like Grant’s support the few doctors educated on the tricky surgery and help get the largely rural patients to the distant hospital.

The author provides vivid, hopeful snapshots of doctors, patients and others in the non-governmental ecosystem where the foundation has facilitated tens of thousands of life-changing surgeries. Along the way, she admits to entertaining some disquieting thoughts, including questioning who truly benefits from international aid and whether she initially cast herself as a savior in a romanticized Africa.

Her stories are well balanced between nonprofit business concerns and patients, and Grant uses description and dialogue so effectively the book often reads like a novel. Although Grant’s own stories of childbirth or personal crisis are sometimes jarring against the greater backdrop of her work, she interjects them sparingly. Her story builds to a $15 million grant from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, validating the foundation’s effectiveness.

Grant’s absorbing account will surely inspire women leaders—and perhaps prompt donations as well.

Also available in hardcover and ebook.