Introductory Remarks Omitted

Deputy Administrator Steinberg. I wanted to begin with a personal story. My father, Dr. Warren Steinberg, served for many years as president of the Los Angeles Human Relations Commission and was also a high school principal in Los Angeles. Nearly three decades ago, he was the first administrator in his region to launch a program to support and counsel LGBT students on his campus. The program was called Project 10—in recognition of the fact that perhaps 10 percent of the student population was LGBT. He came under huge attack for this project— not so much in our community, but from demagogues here in Washington. One Senator threatened to destroy my father's career if one penny of federal money was being used to support the program.

I remember calling my father to offer my support and congratulations on his work to defend the human rights of these students. My father said that yes, human rights was one motivation for his work, but more important was the fact that students who were uncomfortable with their sexual identity were far more likely to drop out of school, far more likely to use drugs or alcohol and far more likely to have problems in the classroom. He saw the program as a natural part of his lifetime role as an educator. He said, “How can we teach these kids algebra and colonial history and ignore sexual identity issues that will fundamentally shape the rest of their lives?”

This pragmatic, even utilitarian approach toward LGBT issues guides the work of my agency, USAID, under the great leadership of President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

At USAID, we understand that our development assistance will never be fully effective unless we draw on the full contributions of the entire population, including previously marginalized groups such as the LGBT community, women, young people, ethnic and religious minorities, people with disabilities, and displaced persons.

For the LGBT community, as spelled out in President's Obama historic memorandum last December, this means supporting projects for the political, economic and social empowerment of the community; helping protect LGBT people during periods of conflict or humanitarian emergencies; and mainstreaming and integrating these issues into our broader programs to ensure food security, improve global health, address climate change, and build democracy and good governance.

Most of all, it means involving the LGBT community in our partner countries as planners, implementers and beneficiaries of all our programs under the watchwords, “Nothing about them without them.”

Nice words, perhaps, but I want to be specific about how we're putting them into practice. From Colombia and Honduras, to Mali and Uganda, to Honduras and Pakistan, we are providing financial and technical assistance to civil society groups promoting the rights and well-being of the LGBT community. We are using our convening authority and our platform abroad to expand broad public awareness of LGBT issues, meeting publicly with LGBT activists from Mongolia and Romania to Kenya and South Africa. Last October, we began including in all of project proposals, grants and contracts language that strongly encourages our implementing partners not to discriminate against LGBT persons in the conduct of their USAID-funded projects.

Working with the State Department, we're supporting Secretary Clinton's Global Equality Fund, which will strengthen LGBT advocates around the world. And in the near future, USAID will launch a $12 million global partnership with other governments, advocacy groups and academic institutions that will identify and implement best practices with respect to development, and fund groundbreaking research to quantify the economic cost of discrimination against LGBT communities around the world.

To support these efforts, we've appointed for the first time a senior coordinator for LGBT issues, who is backed by an advisory committee including officers addressing research, partnerships, public affairs, and legal rights of the LGBT community.

Within USAID itself, we're changing as well. With the strong encouragement of President Obama and Secretary Clinton, we were the first federal agency to publish a recruitment brochure targeting LGBT applicants. We've issued new regulations to ensure that we're providing full benefits for same-sex domestic partners for our various classes of employees.

We've proudly sworn-in openly gay mission directors to lead a number of our key missions abroad, and we're providing awards to those within our ranks are leading the LGBT space. We meet regularly with GLIFFA, our in-house affinity group, as well as U.S. and international advocates, including many of the people in this room, to seek your guidance. Our new internal list-serve, LGBT Champions, is serving as a form of communications for those addressing LGBT issues. Most of all, we're consciously and purposefully seeking to create at USAID a safe space for LGBT individuals and their advocates to discuss and debate these issues.

We still have a long way to go, but I believe that day-by-day, we are making small but significant progress. And while we wish that progress were swifter and more secure, I am inspired by the words of Robert F. Kennedy, which I keep on my desk.

Kennedy said, “Each time a person stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he or she sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

Introductory Remarks Omitted

Dr. Shah. This is a definitive moment for development.

In the last few years, social media has helped turn authoritarianism on its head across the Middle East and unite families separated during an earthquake in Haiti; private investment in emerging economies has grown to dwarf official development assistance in aggregate; and new technologies—perhaps most notably the mobile phone—has transformed the lives of billions of people in the farthest corners of the globe.

At the same time, we're facing new circumstances here at home.

We're drawing down from two large-scale wars, bringing our troops home, and rethinking how we project military power across the globe. Admiral James Stavridis, our four star NATO Commander, just delivered a TED-talk about the need to adopt a new “open source” security framework that is focused more on building bridges than building walls.

We're adapting to considerable new fiscal constraints under the budget control act, as the United States Congress prepares against a deadline to agree on a major deficit-reduction plan that will have as great an effect on the development dollar as it does on defense.

The decisions we will make over the next four, six, or ten months will essentially determine a new framework for American leadership abroad.

At the same time, we all know the background— that most of the American public greatly overestimates foreign aid as nearly a quarter of the total budget, instead of its actual level of 1 percent. And in some parts of our politics, we still debate about whether development is about buying favor or buying results.

So it's easy to see why it's become fairly popular to give big speeches with titles like “the end of aid.” I have read three such speeches in just the last year!

It's true that official development assistance should have an end. And that institutions like USAID should work to put themselves out of business.

But what's so often missing in our debate is how we define our end state goals, how we achieve them, and what comes next.

What is achievable in development is becoming increasingly clear.

We know that powerful demographic shifts are underway that will add billions of people to our population in precisely the settings least able to handle their needs.

We know that temperatures will grow warmer, rains more erratic and droughts more vicious, putting disproportionate pressure on developing countries and the global poor.

And we know that these issues will be increasingly intertwined with extremism and conflict—as we see in the reality that Yemen could be the first country to genuinely run out of water.

But we have heard these warnings before. Paul Ehrlich wrote the Population Bomb predicting widespread starvation at the same time that Dr. Norman Borlaug was inventing new high-yielding wheat varieties and starting a Green Revolution—perhaps USAID's single greatest historic accomplishment.

And today we see dwarf wheat varieties everywhere.

From new vaccines to policy breakthroughs such as conditional cash transfers delivered via mobile phones…

… from new insights about how to empower women to the simple idea that we can finally get donor coordination right by putting all our projects on Google Maps…

…we now have the capacity to achieve amazing end-state goals within a generation.

Consider these three.

First, within a generation, we can end preventable child death and get nearly all children learning in their classrooms.

The Economist has labeled recent gains in saving children's lives in poor parts of the world the biggest success story in development. In the last 50 years, the world has reduced child mortality by 70 percent. And over the last decade, school attendance has increased by 50 percent in Africa and 84 percent in South and West Asia.

The global statistics are astounding— but we can even see progress even in the toughest of places. In Afghanistan, from 2001 to today, we helped expand the number of children enrolled in primary school from 750,000 boys enrolled under the Taliban to more than 8 million children today, nearly 35 percent of whom are girls. And our health partnerships have reached 64 percent of Afghan families with basic, low-cost health services resulting in the largest drop in maternal mortality anywhere in the world and a near 50 percent reduction in kids under five who die.

Now there is much more to do. Even as we enjoy Aspen this year, more than 7.5 million children will die before they celebrate their 5th birthday. And of all those kids who now go to school, experts estimate that less than half will learn basic literacy skills at grade level.

But these are solvable problems. We know because we are solving them as we speak. Our new approach to education prioritizes testing and reading outcomes— and we see a strong performance response. And we just co-hosted a major Child Survival Call to Action with more than 80 countries present: 56 commit to ending preventable child death in their nation, more than 30 plan to issue specific scorecards to track their efforts in a public and transparent manner, and the 5 countries that account for half of the 7 million kids that die each announced real partnerships to achieve that goal.

Taken together, these efforts will lead to what the World Bank has called a demographic dividend. As children survive and thrive, families have fewer children, and invest more in their futures. Demographic dividends have added as much as 1.5 to 2 percent to growth rates in South East Asia for more than 15 years.

Today, young people under the age of 19 in developing countries comprise nearly 30 percent of the entire global population and 60% of the Arab world is under the age of 25. We have to act today to help ensure that this youth bulge becomes an engine of growth.

Second, within a generation, if we continue on the trend we're on, we can reduce extreme poverty by more than 60 percent—lifting more than 700 million people out of dollar-and-a-quarter a day poverty and back from the brink of hunger and malnutrition.

But if we accelerate our progress from 3 percent annual reduction to over 6 percent and focus on key turnarounds in some difficult countries, we could get a 90 percent reduction. We could essentially eliminate dollar-and-a-quarter head count poverty.

If you think that's fiction, just consider the fact that between 2005 and 2008 overall poverty headcount fell in each region in the world—including sub-Saharan Africa—for the first time in human history.

Think about that. From when we started collecting data on poverty through 1993, the total number of extreme poor kept going up. Between 1993 and 2005, the number of people living in poverty fell by an astonishing one-third—more than 600 million driven by Brazil, India, and China. Now we actually see Sub Saharan Africa joining that trajectory.

Much could derail this progress—perhaps most notably food and agricultural insecurity, the challenge of green growth, and the curse of oil and mineral resources managed poorly. But again, these are solvable problems if we choose to engage aggressively. And again we know that because we have proof.

Finally, within a generation the global community can help transition nearly all the democracies that have the bare minimum of democratic trappings—like elections and civilian rule—to more complete democracies, where all citizens can participate in their government, fight corruption, and enjoy equal protection under the law.

In 1974, according to Freedom House, more than 111 countries—nearly 75 percent of our world—was defined by authoritarian rule. In the decades since, 76 of those countries broke free and become early democracies. Even more remarkably, three-fifths of them made the leap in a short time to what Freedom House calls a liberal democracy.

If we stay committed, within a generation, the global community could flip the scale to realize a world where nearly 75 percent of countries will be democracies—and a nearly 90 percent of those will enjoy the rule of law, accountable institutions, and safeguards for human rights.

Now I won't stand before a former Secretary of State and the Chair of the National Democratic Institute and claim democracy this will just happen. It takes local leadership, time, and persistence. But I spent time in Yemen recently where we support NDI to work with youth and civil society groups as part of that country's National Dialogue leading up to a genuine election. This work yields results, and without our engagement, it simply would not happen.

But just setting goals and envisioning this future doesn't make it real. We have to provide a clear path to getting there. And I would propose to get there we need break out of a top-down institutionally driven model of development and adopt an Open Source Development model that empowers more people everywhere to tackle these challenges. Effective development enables a system of free enterprise to take hold and connect to an integrated global economy in a way that protects the opportunities of vulnerable and poor populations to survive and thrive.

Since World War II, we've built a significant institutional architecture to facilitate this task. And we've had incredible successes along the way, especially supporting countries that lead themselves— in nations like South Korea, Chile, Turkey and Poland, all of which have made the transition from aid recipients to donors.

But I believe the landscape has changed—and institutions in development have been the slow to adapt.

Twenty-five years ago, the World Bank annual meeting effectively brought together the entire global development community. Today, that community has dramatically expanded, and most key participants don't attend that gathering.

Today, seizing our opportunities involves partnering deeply with…

…corporate leaders like Virkam Pandit of Citi and Andrew Witty of Glaxo-SmithKline, who understand that their firms have a corporate social opportunity to reach new markets by developing solutions that will empower the poor…

… faith leaders like Rick and Kay Warren of Saddleback Church, who are trying to unleash hundreds of thousands of development volunteers specifically to train health workers in Africa and serve the needs of those least fortunate …

….philanthropists like Bill Gates and Mo Ibrahim, who have studied these issues deeply and can bring their private sector expertise to bear on solving challenges…

…and youth leaders at college campuses throughout the country and around the world, who are not only traveling abroad in record numbers, but oversubscribing to college courses on global health and development.

Most formal development institutions have not yet figured out how to tap into this vast expertise, instead continuing to promulgate a We Are the World model of inviting engagement in development.

That's the album that came out in 1985 to raise money for famine relief in Africa. It reached #1 in 2 weeks—a record that had been only previously been met by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

The reason it was so popular, besides Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen, was that, at the time, it was the only way for average individuals who were inspired to act to do something about the morally terrifying images they saw on TV.

Unless you were joining the Peace Corps, development had simply always been the exclusive realm of large expert organizations.

Now we live in a world— call it the Kiva-world— where a student anywhere can go online and choose the individual dairy farmer she wants to support in Kenya and offer that farmer a $25 loan.

That diary farmer can then invest in her business, vaccinate her animals, improve their feedstock, and track milk output and local prices through her mobile phone using an application called iCOW. She can use that data to negotiate across different buyers and even use her phone to report suspected corruption within her local dairy cooperative.

In an open source development model, inventors around the world could observe that her biggest challenge is getting the milk to a chilling facility before it spoils and could invent new forms of “on-farm” ultra-pasteurization that could solve that problem for her and others.

If we're going to deliver on ambitious development goals within the next two decades, then we have to employ a much bigger definition of development to get us there.

Development is too important and creativity too diffuse to be left entirely to the post WWII development institutions, including USAID.

To support an open source development approach, our Agency must serve as a platform that connects world's biggest development challenges to development problems solvers—all around the world. We recognize that talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not.

At USAID, we are putting this idea to the test.

We've launched a series of Grand Challenges that have encouraged more than 1,500 innovators — nearly half from developing countries — to submit groundbreaking proposals for new technologies and approaches to save lives at birth, get all children reading, and power agriculture through clean, off-grid energy. Even when potential inventors do not win grant awards, they are able to join global communities of practice and improve their capacity to realize their mission.

We've launched a Development Innovation Venture Fund, so we can help entrepreneurs take a creative idea—like monitoring ballot boxes with camera phones in Afghanistan—and evaluate and scale them.

And this fall, we will launch a Higher Education Solutions Network, modeled in part on the Blum Center at Berkeley, to expand the pool of informed problem-solvers in our own country and provide them the space to tackle the development challenges of our time.

But an open source development model is not just about bringing more Americans to the task. By getting into the business of sharing risk with local banks and investors using credit guarantees, we've unlocked more than $2.3 billion in private investment through our Development Credit Authority—helping to put local wealth to work for development. For every 28 dollars that get to entrepreneurs and small businesses, we spend 1.

And we've focused on helping countries from Ghana to South Sudan participate in the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative so their local wealth actually advances, instead of undermines, their development performance.

These efforts have all been part of an ambitious reform agenda we call USAID Forward. One of the most controversial aspects of these reforms is our commitment to finding, supporting, and building strong local institutions that would represent our own exit strategy over time. We simply cannot keep writing big checks to big contractors to do tasks in countries without an effective strategy for exit and sustainability.

But the ultimate test of open source development has to be whether we can generate results at scale.

Consider the chronic issue of hunger in Africa. Donors have for decades designed programs that help African farmers—usually a few hundred small scale farmers at a time and for 3-5 years before moving on to the next priority.

The Obama Administration has tried to change that approach. We launched Feed the Future in 2009 to reach millions of small scale farmers in countries that were willing to make tough policy reforms and increase their own investment. We are investing in science and technology and publishing results online. And we know its working—Feed the Future helped millions of people in Kenya and Ethiopia avoid the need for food aid during last year's tragic drought and in Bangladesh an entire state that has never before had enough food to feed its population is now producing a surplus.

But the real potential of Feed the Future is its next, more open source, stage. We've worked with six countries in sub-Saharan Africa to help them make reforms to entice private investment and simultaneously worked with 45 food and agriculture companies around the world to introduce them to business opportunities in these nations.

For this year's G8 meeting, these firms made $4.5 billion in investment commitments—to expand seed production and distribution, map soil quality, establish small scale irrigation businesses, and source more food for global supply chains. International organizations agreed to ensure these investments reach the poorest farmers—mostly women, and G8 partners agreed to coordinate our aid in a manner that would allow these new public-private partnerships to succeed.

We expect this New Alliance to move 50 million people out of poverty in 10 years and to show that African agriculture is open for business. Our role is as a facilitator and connector—not the party in charge.

In an open source development model, we will not always have the control we have grown accustomed to exercising, and we have to get used to that.

My favorite story here belongs to a young woman named Gigi Ibrahim, one of the powerful, young citizen journalists who wielded her blackberry as a weapon of revolution in the rise against President Mubarak of Egypt. She tweeted locations of protests, security alerts, and notes to human rights organizations about the latest arrests or violations.

Several months later, Jon Stewart had her on the Daily Show—and when he asked her how she came to play a pivotal part in this movement, she explained to the rather surprised audience that she had taken a class at the American University in Cairo called the “Social Mobilization Under Authoritarian Regimes” and concentrated on the role of social media as an enabler.

I doubt that was an expected outcome when USAID funded the university for over 20 years, proving that when we start enabling networks of activity, we simply cannot know what they will end up achieving.

This shift from designing and implementing projects to serving as a connector—reaching out to local entrepreneurs, governments, and civil society leaders and enabling them to find partners from around the world—has unlocked something exciting in our staff.

And I would like to close on this note.

Many of us in this room and thousands of other across the globe have and continue to spend tremendous energy on improving our effectiveness in development. We choose smarter things to do, focusing on key competencies and appropriate roles. We measure relentlessly, inviting cold hard facts to challenge our warm, fuzzy assumptions. We have become hard-nosed in pursuit of our soft goals, and, when doing so, we have often invoked the ideal of “How They Do It In The Private Sector.”

I recently had the chance to meet with several very serious experts on private sector management and leadership, and set out to take notes and learn what new methods we might be able to borrow and adapt for our work. What surprised me was the central and powerful place some exceedingly soft ideas have in their hard analyses of corporate leadership. Forging common purpose and shared values. Meaningful work. Deep respect for others. A sense of being part of something bigger than oneself. These are make or break issues to them.

Ford Motor Company was turned around by a man who made employees stand before car dealers and suppliers and say, “We love you,” out loud and in unison while simultaneously reminding his senior executives to smile more and remember that, and I quote, “the purpose of life is to love and be loved.”

Now, don't worry—I am not going to ask us to stand, hold hands, or hug. But I do want us to stop and think.

In development, we're paying more and better attention to important details—but do we every day remain big enough?

Development attracts many of the best students, brightest minds, and strongest spirits. Open source development can help keep these people inspired through the full arc of a career by offering the true reward of being successful—combining productivity with meaning. Accountability and measurement do enhance satisfaction. But we need to be sure that we refresh, discuss, deepen and celebrate the sense of shared and higher purpose that brought us to our work in the first place.

If we do, perhaps we could spend less time thinking about how to sell development to a skeptical public and more genuine effort at connecting the core individual quest for meaning and value to our efforts.

Vice President Gore, who gave me my first job in politics, has been so effective in his leadership that my young son dutifully walks into a room where I am reading, turns off the lights, and explains to me I don't need them because my IPAD has a backlit screen. He's 6 years old and his respect for resources is already a part of how he defines himself.

Perhaps we need to explore how we could use an open source development model to connect our work to all people. Perhaps to genuinely win the war against extreme poverty, leverage social networks to deliver real democracy, and ensure every kid everywhere lives to see their fifth birthday and thrives in school in the years ahead, we need to both elevate development in the Situation Room of the National Security Council and in the hearts and minds of how millions of additional people express their own personal quest for meaning.

Thank you.

Introductory Remarks Omitted

Secretary Clinton. So we have two women doctors who are leading the way on health in Uganda, and I am excited about being here, because I have heard for a long time about the work that Reach Out does. And Reach Out is well named, because what you have done is to be sure that people in the area have a place to come to be given support, to be given treatment, to be given dignity in order to achieve their own personal goals of being healthy and productive citizens.

Today, more than 300,000 Ugandans are receiving treatment through PEPFAR. PEPFAR is the program that the United States started under President George W. Bush. And I will be looking forward to be meeting with John Robert Engole who eight years ago was near death. He was the first person in the world to receive life-saving medication through PEPFAR. And now there are 300,000 Ugandans receiving medication through PEPFAR. And I want to do more to make sure that every person has the opportunity to become healthy.

And we have seen here at Reach Out and in other places across your country how this can be done. In the 1990s, thanks to your government, thanks to your officials, thanks to the citizens, we had the best program in the world right here in Uganda. And we saw how the prevalence of this disease could drop dramatically from nearly 20 percent to below 7 percent.

However, I am here because I am worried. In recent years, the focus on prevention has faded, and new infections are on the rise again. I had the opportunity to discuss this with the President and with the Minister. Uganda is now the only country in Sub-Saharan Africa where the rate of HIV is going up instead of going down. Now, I know that Ugandans, when you put your mind to something, can really get it done. So I'm hoping that together we can work on making prevention the focus again and making sure that rate of infection goes down, down, down.

So we're going to work with you. I've made that pledge to the President and to the health minister. We're going to review our strategy with the Ministry, with civil society groups, and other partners, because we want to emphasize what we think will work. And one area that I particularly care about as a mother is to eliminate mother-to-child transmissions of the virus. And we can do that, and our Government in the United States recently committed an additional $25 million. I hope I will come back in a few years, and there will be no babies in Uganda being born with the HIV Virus.

We are very proud, Minister, to be partnering with you and with the Ministry of Health. Experts from our Centers for Disease Control recently arrived in Uganda, because we not only work with you on HIV/AIDS; we're also working with you now on the outbreak of the Ebola Virus. We want to work with you on maternal and child health. There is so much that we believe is possible here in Uganda.

Now, clinics like this, this wonderful program in this beautiful place needs resources, and all of us must keep up our funding commitments—the Government of Uganda, other donors like the United States, and I am looking forward to being able to work with you to do that. This clinic is a model not only for Uganda, but for all of Africa, indeed for the world. And I can see it has a lot of citizen and community support. And that's what makes it work, and that's what's made Uganda unique in the fight against HIV and AIDS.

I want Uganda, once again, to be the model for the world, and I know Uganda can be. When I first came to Uganda in the mid-1990s when my husband was President, I came because there wasn't anywhere else I could have gone in the world that was doing a better job. When I came back with my husband on his trip as President—and I don't know if you remember, but when he was—as President in those years when he traveled across Africa and he came to Uganda, he met a little boy who had just been born, and they named him Bill Clinton. And so my husband was just back in Uganda a week ago, and he met Bill Clinton, who's now about 12 years old. And he's healthy, and he's handsome, and he's doing well in school. That's what we want for every boy and girl in Uganda. We want a good future.

So let me close by saying that the American people are deeply proud to be your partners and your friends, and we're going to keep working together on the economy, on better opportunities for people, as President Museveni said, on electricity, on infrastructure, on security, education, and health. And we have so much confidence that Uganda will, once again, be a model in HIV/AIDS, continue to develop, and make a difference for the people of this great and beautiful country. Thank you all, and God bless you.

Introductory Remarks Omitted

Secretary Clinton. I don't need to tell you this is a time of such great change. New technologies are transforming how people everywhere work, learn, and communicate. Demographic shifts are remaking societies with huge numbers of young people in some places and disproportionate numbers of older people in others. The democracy movements that have sprung up worldwide create exciting possibilities for countries that have been ruled for years by dictators, but they also pose, as we have dramatically seen, great challenges as people grapple with how to turn their democratic ideals into functioning governments and prosperous economies.

Emerging powers like China, Brazil, and India have a bigger hand in shaping world events, which is helping to reshape the global order, changing how countries engage with each other, and how companies do business—many of those represented here—as well as how foundations and universities think about forging partnerships worldwide.

Now in the face of all this change, those who care about having an impact on the world have to do two important things at once. We must think and act innovatively and be willing to change ourselves to keep pace with the change around us, and at the same time, we must stay true to our values. Otherwise, we will lose our way. Now from my conversations with many of you, I know that you yourselves, your organizations, your businesses are working every day to do that. Well, so is the United States. And there is no area in which this is more evident than in our development efforts. And that's what I want to talk with you briefly about today because it dovetails with what CGI really represents.

Now I know effective development is close to the hearts of many of you in this room, and it's close to my heart as well. As Bill said, it's something that I've worked on my entire adult life, and I've certainly spoken here before about how vital it is to our national interests and to our efforts to build a world that is more stable, more prosperous, and more free.

And so the Obama Administration has elevated development as an essential pillar of our national security alongside defense and diplomacy. First thing I said upon becoming Secretary of State is that we could no longer have defense over here with our military—the most extraordinary young men and women in the world—but we needed to integrate defense with diplomacy and development. And we also had to change the way we did both diplomacy and development. Respecting development first, because while we had achieved strong results in some places, we were certain we could do better.

Second, because true transformation comes only through sustainable strategies. And too often in the past, we had focused, understandably, on the urgent and immediate at the expense of the long term.

Third, because the landscape of development has changed. The strategies that we had used in the past were no longer sufficient. Consider this: In the 1960s, official development assistance from countries like the United States represented 70 percent of the capital flows going into developing countries. Since then, we've increased our development budgets, and yet even with those increases, development assistance now represents just 13 percent of capital flowing into developing countries because the amount of investment, trade, domestic resources, and remittances to those countries has skyrocketed.

Now, that's a good thing. And it means we have to spend development dollars differently, which I'll return to in a moment. Further, the number of recipients of development assistance with the capacity to design and implement their own development programs has grown considerably. So we have to ask ourselves: How do we take advantage of that capacity and reinforce it? New partners have become involved in development, including former recipients of aid who are now new donors themselves. And how can we help them contribute to effective, common solutions? Massive political change is unfolding in several places where we work. How can our development assistance help drive that change in the right direction?

Now these are some of the questions that we have asked ourselves from the start of this Administration, and today I want to talk to you about what we've learned and how we're applying those lessons to our development work around the world, and I want to talk about the challenges that still remain and how all of you can help us solve them. I'll focus on three overarching objectives of this Administration's approach.

The first is we want to move from aid to investment. When development assistance represented a much greater portion of a country's resources, we had to be smart about how to use it, no question. Yet the situation was often more stark and less complex. People needed food and medicine and schools and wells and power in order to develop. And assistance was one of the few and only ways they could get it.

But today, with so many other resources flowing into developing countries, development assistance can and should play a different role. We have to think differently about how it fits into a more dynamic economic picture, and how it can be a catalyst for economic growth and self-sustaining progress.

For example, there are risks that discourage companies from doing business in developing countries. And I heard yesterday at the opening plenary that Jim Kim really made a most generous and important offer: Companies should go to the World Bank and ask about risk assessment; that's what the World Bank does for every country in the world. Well, you can also come to the State Department. We do the same. And through our development programs, we can help to mitigate and reduce investment risks. There are structural barriers that prevent citizens from contributing to their economies like outdated land tenure laws, the lack of access to education. And through development, we can help development organizations and private sector interests tackle those problems. USAID and the Millennium Challenge Corporation, for example, assist on strategies to strengthen property rights and expand schooling and can work in partnership with private sector partners.

There are many entrepreneurs in developing economies who are ready to launch new businesses, but first they need access to credit. We can help more domestic and international financial institutions provide it, such as through loan guarantees by the U.S. Development Credit Authority and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation.

In the 21^st century, the work of development must include all this and more. We're not only providing aid to people in crisis, we are making strategic investments, some of which may pay off right away, but others further down the road in stronger communities and long-term economic growth.

One example of this aid-to-investment approach is in Haiti, which you may hear more about today when my Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills speaks. Five months ago, a shipment of sewing machines was unpacked at the brand new Caracol Industrial Park in northern Haiti. The first tenant was the Korean apparel company, Sae-A, one of the largest garment manufacturers in the world. Today, that factory has 800 employees, most of them women who have never had a formal sector job before. Many are graduates of a new vocational training center nearby. By the end of the year, Sae-A will nearly double their employees, and they're on track to reach their goal of creating 20,000 jobs by 2016. Additionally, a new power plant opened this year to serve the industrial park and surrounding communities. Nine buildings, including factories, warehouses, and offices, have been built and more are under construction. A second tenant, a Haitian company, has just moved in.

Now this is part of a much larger coordinated strategy between the Government of Haiti, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the United States Government, and the private sector to create access to jobs, housing, electrification, transportation, and agricultural development. And these types of investments, when married with the entrepreneurial spirit of the Haitian people, are helping to catalyze growth in Haiti's north.

Now, I have to say this was controversial. When Cheryl and I first started working on this, there were a lot of development professionals and experts who really were quite concerned, and even skeptical. But you cannot have development in today's world without partnering with the private sector, and that has been our mantra, and we are now creating examples. Are there pitfalls? Are there problems? Of course there are. There is with any kind of organized effort at development. But the fact is that including the private sector gives developing economies new opportunities.

In the last decade, for example, six of the world's ten fastest-growing countries were in Africa. That number will soon rise to seven. In the wake of the global financial crisis, many developing countries grew faster and more steadily than the world's biggest economies. And private sector investments there often yield greater returns than those in more developed markets. In a few areas in particular, infrastructure, energy, and agriculture, development intersects with business opportunities, and the State Department is working to get more American companies invested in those fields in developing countries.

Now, wise investors, of course, choose their investments carefully and they manage for risks. And when a particular investment is not producing the projected returns, they have to make the tough decision about whether to modify or eliminate it. All this must be true in government sponsored development aid too. We need to be as rigorous as possible about producing tangible results.

The second objective of this Administration's approach to development is what we call country ownership. Now that's a phrase people use a lot in development circles without always being clear about its meaning, so let me be clear about what it means to us. It doesn't mean some things that people immediately leap to. It doesn't mean, as some have feared, that donors are supposed to keep money flowing indefinitely while recipients decide how to spend it. It doesn't mean government-run, freezing-out civil society groups and faith-based organizations. And country-owned certainly doesn't mean that countries are on their own. To us, country ownership means that a nation's efforts are increasingly led, implemented, and eventually paid for by its government, communities, civil society, and private sector.

Now, to get there, we all have to play our part. A country's political leaders must set priorities and set national plans to accomplish them with input from their citizens. They must follow through on those commitments and hold themselves accountable. And donors, like the United States, must be willing to follow our partner country's lead.

Now at times that will mean setting aside our own policy preferences or development orthodoxies. Developing countries have access to evidence-based analysis and best practices, so they're engaged and equipped to decide what will work for their country, and we have to promote that so that they begin to take this responsibility and accountability.

Country ownership is also about funding. We aim for nations to be able to pay for more of their own development. But more than that, it's about countries building the capacity to set priorities, manage resources, develop their own plans, and carry them out. And we can all agree that should be the goal.

Now progress is already occurring. For example, several countries have taken greater ownership over their health care systems. Sierra Leone has enlisted more than 1,700 women to serve as health monitors, checking up on local clinics and reporting problems back to the National Health Ministry. The Government of Botswana now manages, operates, and pays for their national HIV treatment programs. And with our support through PEPFAR, it's working with American universities to build a medical school that will train their nation's next generation of health care workers.

In India, when the National AIDS Control program was launched six years ago, half of its budget came from outside donors. Today, less than one-fifth does; the Indian Government covers the rest. And Rwanda and the United States are now working toward a new kind of partnership. The United States will continue to provide support for our health programs, including PEPFAR, as well as programs on maternal and child health, family planning, and TB. But the Rwandan Government will do the managing, monitoring, and evaluating of these programs, and most will be run through Rwanda's own public system. We've already transferred patients receiving care through PEPFAR to clinics run by Rwandans. Meanwhile, Rwanda's increased ownership and capacity frees our resources so that we can focus more on a priority that they've identified, namely, training local healthcare workers. Because in the face of the HIV/AIDS crisis over the last 10-15 years, we have brought a lot of resources, including human resources, to countries, but they must be able to start building their own resources.

Now because of partnerships like these, we are establishing a new Office of Global Health Diplomacy at the State Department, which will coordinate our diplomatic engagement and provide our ambassadors with the tools and information they need to have a greater impact where the real healthcare work is happening on the ground.

Let me mention one other key aspect of what country ownership means. It means ownership by the whole country—men and women. A growing body of evidence proves what is intuitive: When more women enter the workforce, it spurs innovation, increases productivity, and grows economies. Families then have more money to spend, businesses can expand their consumer base and increase their profits. In short, everyone benefits.

Now country ownership naturally leads to our third goal: putting ourselves out of business. It still surprises me that this is a controversial thing to say. It shouldn't be. Around the world, I hear from leaders who know that ultimately it must be their responsibility to provide economic opportunity, healthcare, good schools for their people. And they do not want to turn to other nations forever to help meet those responsibilities. And frankly, I look forward to the day when our development assistance will no longer be needed, when it is replaced by strong public institutions and civil societies, when private sector investments and trade are robust in both directions, and people have the chance, through their own hard work, to build better lives for themselves and their families.

So putting ourselves out of business means putting a special emphasis on self-sufficiency. So we are working with partner countries to strengthen their political will for reform and provide technical assistance on issues like taxation so they can mobilize their own domestic resources for long-term development.

And one of the issues that I have been preaching about around the world is collecting taxes in an equitable manner, especially from the elites in every country. You know I'm out of American politics, but—it is a fact that around the world, the elites of every country are making money. There are rich people everywhere. And yet they do not contribute to the growth of their own countries. They don't invest in public schools, in public hospitals, in other kinds of development internally. And so it means for leaders telling powerful people things they don't want to hear. It means being transparent about budgets and revenues and bringing corruption to light. And when that happens, we shouldn't punish countries for uncovering corruption. We should reward them for doing so. And it means putting in place regulations designed to attract and protect investment.

I just met in the last few days with the new president of a country who is trying to tackle corruption, and I said, “Well, I have here a lot of the international lists of where your country stands on business climate, on corruption, on government transparency, and you are near or at the bottom. And it is time for you to recognize that in an interconnected global economy, you will benefit from doing what you should be doing internally for yourself.” And so we have to have that kind of hard talk, which we do on a regular basis.

So for nearly four years, this Administration has been updating our development assistance with these objectives in mind. We designed our Feed the Future food security initiative and our Global Health Initiative with an emphasis on country ownership and investment. We launched an ambitious reform initiative under Dr. Raj Shah's leadership, USAID Forward, which among other things focuses on how to identify and bring to scale path-breaking innovations. And we're creating groundbreaking renewable energy investment vehicles in Africa through the Overseas Private Investment Corporation. And we've launched a range of public-private partnerships through our Global Partnership Initiative. In fact, I announced one example here two years ago, the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, which is working to help 100 million households in developing countries switch to clean cookstoves by 2020 to save lives, improve health, and reduce climate change.

But there still is a lot of work for us to do, and that's where you come in. There's one further step in particular I want to mention. I'll be speaking about this at greater length later in the year, and that is investing more deeply in a broader range of partners. Today, much of our development assistance is still invested through one group of partners—international NGOs. They have expertise and local knowledge, and they can respond quickly when needed. We want to continue our successful relationships with them, but we also need to broaden and increase our network of partnerships to advance our work in development. Given the landscape we face, that makes sense.

Now this is the next big leap, because we need you to help us make it. The entire spectrum of the international development community is represented in this audience. And there are steps we can start taking together. Let's start viewing all our separate efforts as a portfolio of complementary investments. Rather than measuring only development assistance by governments, we should also measure the full set of investments by businesses, by civil society groups and the multilaterals, to get the whole picture of the scope and scale of our combined engagement. And let's do a better job of measuring our own performances, including how well we leverage partnerships, and be transparent with the results. And we should measure the performance of our partners, not just our projects. The process may frankly be uncomfortable for all of us, but it is essential for getting better results.

So as we work toward the next round of global development goals—not only the Millennium Development Goals, some of which we've made progress on, others of which are still out of reach—but also the new effort that Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon talked about yesterday on sustainable development goals. Let's redouble our commitment to multi-partner approaches that bring all of us together. Increasingly, as everyone at CGI knows well, our goals and efforts overlap, and we should deepen our cooperation.

Now all of the work I've described briefly today reflects America's enduring commitment to help more people in more places live up to their God-given potential, to chart their own destinies, and realize the full measure of their human dignity. Dignity is a word that has a lot of resonance in development. It may mean different things to different people and cultures, but it speaks to something universal in all of us. As one Egyptian observed in the wake of that country's revolution, freedom and dignity are more important than food and water. When you eat in humiliation, you can't taste the food.

So for the United States, as we pursue our development agenda around the world, working to improve and save lives, to spur growth, we are working to advance freedom and dignity. We are standing up for democracies that unlock people's potential and standing against extremists who exploit people's frustrations. We are trying to help societies leave behind old enmities and look ahead to new opportunities. We are backing reformers who build accountable institutions and combat corruption that stifles innovation, initiative, hope, and yes, dignity.

And we are championing the universal human rights of all people, including the right to worship freely, to assemble and protest peacefully, and yes, to freedom of expression. These rights are bound together, inseparable not just in our own constitution, but in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Threatening one threatens all. Each of these steps helps create the conditions where people can reach for and find a sense of dignity for themselves and their societies. But dignity does not come from avenging insults, especially with violence that can never be justified.

It comes from taking responsibility and advancing our common humanity.

If you look around the world today, countries that are focused more on fostering growth than fomenting grievance are racing ahead. Building schools instead of burning them; investing in their people's creativity, not inciting their rage; opening their economies and societies to have more connections with the wider world, not shutting off the internet or attacking embassies. The people of the Arab world did not set out to trade the tyranny of a dictator for the tyranny of a mob. There is no dignity in that. The people of Benghazi sent this message loudly and clearly on Friday when they forcefully rejected the extremists in their midst and reclaimed the honor and dignity of a courageous city.

They mourned the loss of Ambassador Chris Stevens, a friend and champion of a free Libya, and his fallen comrades. They are not alone. People and leaders from across the region and the world and beyond have spoken in recent days against violence. Foreign Minister of Tunisia came to Washington last week and personally underscored his country's stand. And unity on this throughout the international community is crucial, because extremists around the world are working hard to drive us apart. All of us need to stand together to resist these forces and to support democratic transitions underway in North Africa and the Middle East.

Throughout this week as I engaged my counterparts from many nations, we discussed and we will continue here at the United Nations how we can work together to build lasting partnerships focused on freedom, human dignity, and development, fostering democracy and universal values. And we need your help and leadership—citizens, businesses, NGOs, nonprofits, the faith community, everyone— we are called to this great cause of the 21^st century. Here at CGI you are standing up for what we need more of in the world.

So thank you. Thank you for devoting your energy, your efforts and your resources to improving our world one day at a time. And thank you for backing your words with concrete commitments that I know are solving problems and changing lives. You reaffirm my faith in the future we are building together. So let's get to work for more freedom, democracy, opportunity, and dignity. Thank you all very much.

Introductory Remarks Omitted

Secretary Clinton. [T]his is the fourth time that we have gathered on the margins of the UN General Assembly to focus the world's attention on food security. In 2009, we reaffirmed the principles reflected in the L'Aquila Food Security Initiative, the international community's $22 billion pledge to support agricultural development worldwide, including the President Obama's pledge of $3.5 billion through what we were beginning to call our Feed the Future Initiative for global hunger and food security.

In 2010, I launched the 1,000 Days partnership with Ireland, the United Nations, and other international partners to improve nutrition from pregnancy through a child's second birthday, which is critical for lifelong health and development. And then last year, we focused on supporting women in agriculture, because women often do the work at every link of the agricultural chain: They grow the food, they store it, they sell it, and prepare it. So we must ensure that women get the support they need if we are serious about improving food security.

As a result of all the work of so many people over the last four years, food security is now at the top of our national and foreign policy agendas, as well as that of so many other nations in the world, because we understand it is a humanitarian and moral imperative, but it also directly relates to global security and stability. I've seen in my travels how increased investments in agriculture and nutrition are paying off in rising prosperity, healthier children, better markets, and stronger communities.

So we meet here today knowing that progress is possible, is taking place. But I want to say a few words about our civil society partners, because along with the private sector, which already is giving unprecedented support to agricultural development in Africa, and now through our New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, are really increasing their investment and their collaboration.

But civil society organizations are crucial to our success in both the public and the private sector. They have longstanding relationships in communities and valuable technical expertise, and they work every single day on their commitment to try to make the world a better place for all of us.

So today, I am pleased to announce a new commitment by civil society groups: InterAction, an alliance of 198 U.S.-based organizations—and Sam Worthington, its president, is here today—is pledging more than $1 billion of private, nongovernmental funds over the next three years to improve food security and nutrition worldwide.

Of this $1 billion, five U.S.-based organizations together have pledged to invest more than $900 million in this effort. They are World Vision, Heifer International, Catholic Relief Services, Save the Children, and ChildFund International. Let's give all five of these great organizations a round of applause.

And just as these organizations hold governments accountable, they have agreed to be held accountable themselves. Starting in 2013, InterAction will make annual reports here at the UN General Assembly on its commitments and disbursements worldwide. And I am so grateful to InterAction and its members for their outstanding support and generosity.

Let's keep in mind the principles that guide us. This week at the UN General Assembly, developing and developed countries together are emphasizing what we know to be true: Country ownership is critical to successful development. When developing countries themselves are in the lead, when programs are designed for their specific strengths and needs, when we work together to build capacity at the local level that can carry progress forward independently, and when new resources are brought to the table in a transparent, collaborative manner, that is the best strategy for achieving concrete, sustainable results. These commitments by civil society reflect this approach, and we all need to rededicate ourselves to it, not only in global food security, but more broadly as we work to achieve the Millennium Development Goals and look beyond those deadlines to our long-term development work. I think we are on the right track, so we just have to keep pushing forward.

Now this will be my last time chairing this meeting. A year from now I will be a private citizen again. But I want to take this opportunity to say to all of you how personally gratifying this work has been for me, as Secretary of State and as an old NGO activist myself, going back more years than I care to remember. I so believe in it and I am so grateful to all of you who have devoted your time and energy and resources to this shared mission.