PRESIDENT CLINTON: Thank you very much. Of all the useless introductions I’ve ever given, this would top the list. (Laughter.)
We’ve already had a good morning laughing and talking about what
happened yesterday, getting a report from Chelsea about a dinner she
attended last night. I just wanted to say one thing to set this little
talk the Secretary of State’s going to give up. More than 40 years ago
when I met Hillary, she was already sort of a walking NGO. (Laughter.)
She was doing all this stuff before most of the rest of us discovered it
was a fruitful way to spend a life.
And as Secretary of State, she has done an enormous amount to extend
the diplomatic efforts of the United States into not just stopping bad
things from happening or diffusing crises or dealing with all the things
that she’ll have to deal with today as soon as she leaves us, which
means she may drag out her remarks a little bit to avoid having to face
some of them. She tries to make good things happen, especially in this
space we’re discussing today. I don’t think any American official has
ever done more to try to raise the issues of girls and women around the
world and what dealing with this means for the future of peace and
security and prosperity of the world. And for that reason more than any
other, I am very glad that she could join us here this morning.
Thank you very much. (Applause.)
SECRETARY CLINTON: Good morning. Good morning. Thank you all
very, very much. Good morning. It is – (applause) – thank you. Thank
you. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank
you.
Well, it’s good to be amongst so many friends. (Laughter.) And I look
out at this audience and I see so many of you whom I have worked with
and known for such a long time. It is so good to be here at the Clinton
Global Initiative. I would be absolutely crazy to try to recognize
anyone in this audience, but I do want to say how pleased we are to see
John and Annie Glenn here today. (Applause.) I am thrilled to see them,
and talk about a lifetime of service, both on the Earth and in the
galaxy. Thank you.
I look forward to CGI, much as you do, because I always learn
something new, and I’m always inspired by what each of you is doing to
help solve problems and seize opportunities around the world. And for
me, I usually get it second, third, and fourth-hand from all of the
people who are participating. But I know the impact that CGI has because
it certainly has had an impact on how I’ve tried to think about the
development work and the partnerships that the United States needs to
have around the world.
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. (Laughter.) You know I’m out of American
politics, but – (applause) – 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. (Applause.)
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