Speech: Clinton Global Initiative Mid-Year Meeting

President Clinton converses with the heads of various foundations and a student on the topic of change and the potential of human agency. Projecting an image of a bright and green future, the conversation highlights notable achievements and urges all to be responsible as global citizens in working towards a better tomorrow.

Full Text:

Good morning and welcome to Nokia Theater. Thank you very much. Thank you for joining us.

Three years ago, we held the first annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative, and since then, every September around the opening of the United Nations, heads of state, business leaders, non-governmental organizations, philanthropists, and others have joined us here in New York to discuss great global challenges, to identify ways we can improve people's lives and the health of our planet, and most important, to make actual concrete commitments to take action in these areas.

So far the individuals, companies, and nonprofits have exceeded our expectations in their commitments and in their delivery. Together people from different nations, political backgrounds, and faiths have made almost 1,000 commitments in 100 countries worth tens of billions of dollars, positively impacting more than 200 million people. These commitments come in many forms: a company might simply decide to change the way it does business to reduce its environmental footprint, a NGO might launch a project for the new part of the world to educate children, and business leaders might offer their expertise to encourage entrepreneurs halfway around the world in developing countries.

At CGI, we value all projects. There's no requirement of a dollar amount or a time amount or a skill level, but they must be new, specific, and measurable. This effort is about doing. Since our last annual meeting, we've announced plans to expand the model to engage new audiences and to inspire action hopefully on a larger scale.

One way we've done this is by giving everyone an opportunity to make a commitment through mycommitment.org, an online platform that connects people who have the same vision for change. In less than a year, people from more than 185 countries have visited our site. Collectively, they have pledged more than 92,000 volunteer hours, most of them people of extremely modest means who pledged $1.50, and they've given more than 40,000 things of value to people who need them more.

All our operations and events are carbon neutral. Last year, CGI members committed to help offset the carbon footprint for the future. We're working with EcoSecurities and Van Ness Feldman to apply the surplus money from 2007 to buy the offsets for this year, and we want to institutionalize the process over the long term.

Last year in New York, we focused on commitments to address climate change, poverty alleviation, global health, and education. In a few minutes, I'll announce some of the results of these commitments, but first I want to introduce a very special guest. For many years now, Dr. R.K. Pachauri has been one of the most inspired leaders and vocal advocates on climate change. Last year, on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an organization which he leads, he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, along with Al Gore. I'm proud to say that Dr. Pachauri is also a CGI member. At the last annual meeting, the NGO he runs, the MGM Resources Institute, made a commitment to bring light to a million people in India by replacing kerosene in paraffin lanterns with solar lighting devices. Adequate lighting in rural India is a serious problem with more than 78 million households lacking access to electricity. Switching to solar lighting will produce healthy, smoke-free environments for rural families to live and work in. A transition to solar can also expand opportunity for villagers who will run the distribution and service centers or the devices themselves. Dr. Pachauri recently expanded this project to bring a total of 30,000 lanterns to over 300 villages in just the first year. Please join me in welcoming this remarkable global citizen to the stage.

DR. R.K. PACHAURI: Thank you very much, President Clinton. It's indeed a unique privilege for me to be here, not because I've been invited by the most outstanding President of the U.S., but as a global citizen, I might say he's clearly the tallest and most respected leader in the world. And therefore, it's wonderful that he's using his time and his position to mobilize a number of initiatives that are going to help all people on this planet.

Why are we talking about this program, this initiative to light a billion lives? Well, the reality is that there are 1.6 billion people in this who don't have access to modern forms of energy or electricity, and a large number of them, therefore, see darkness once the sun goes down.

And as the President mentioned, there are about 80 million households in India that don't have any access to electricity. What they use by way of lighting is essentially candles or a small wick lamp, which uses all kinds of oil with harmful emissions, with inadequate light, and therefore not enough to really make a difference with their living.

If we were to launch this Light a Billion Lives as a major initiative all over the world, which we've already done -- of course we need substantial progress to make it happen -- we are talking about 200 billion households, taking an average of about five people per household. That's the size of this challenge. What would it cost? Well, with the solar lanterns that we produce in India, which my institute has designed, it would cost a total of over $20 billion to cover all the households in the world. Of course, there would be economies of scale by which we can bring down the cost, and therefore, the total cost would actually turn out to be much lower. There would, of course, be other costs, which include mobilizing people, organizing institutional arrangements, NGOs, the corporate sector, and so on. But all in all, may I say that to provide light to a billion lives on this planet will cost less than two months of the cost of the Iraq War.

What we have done basically is work in a number of villages in India, and I wanted to give you the example of villages in the Sunderbans. The Sunderbans are the islands on the delta of the Ganges River, the river Ganga, as it flows into the Bay of Bengal. What we have essentially provided is, for one household, a solar panel on the roof, which the woman of that household uses for charging solar lanterns during the day. And once she's got them charged, she rents them out in the evening to all the households in the village, let's say about 50 or 60 households, and she charges 5 rupees per lantern, which is the equivalent of about, say, 11 or 12 cents a day. But this gives her an occupation, this gives her an income, and it provides the village households a source of lighting which is sustainable and durable. If we were to carry out this initiative to all the billion people who we're talking about, that means roughly 200 million households, this would reduce carbon dioxide emissions per annum by about 25 million metric tons and 50 to 60 billion kilowatts of electricity would be saved, which could be utilized for other productive purposes. And, of course, through the system of reducing more and more and achieving economies of scale, we would actually bring down the cost substantially and create jobs in this entire chain of production, distribution, and implementation of this program.

Just to give you the history of this program, my institute is involved in a number of initiatives in villages across India, and in the course of providing energy solutions in the villages, we ended up studying the needs of households and seeing how we could provide them with solutions in partnership with them for lighting, cooking, and other normal household energy services.

We found that in some of the poorest villages in the world, in the state of Rajasthan, for instance, people were willing to buy solar flashlights or torches or solar lanterns even though they were extremely poor. There were other applications, for instance, in villages in Rajasthan. Women in particular carry out three hours of a chore every day, churning milk and producing butter and buttermilk, and this ties them down. It certainly is a very laborious task, which keeps them away from other productive activities. So therefore, what we did was to develop a little solar device and set it out in the sun, and while it's churning milk for three hours or four hours, the woman of the household can do other things. We developed solar fans, which at the heat of the summer when you get temperatures of 48 or 49 degrees Celsius, you get a little bit of breeze in the home without necessarily spending manual labor.

So we realized that here was a means by which technology could be brought to the doorstep of the poorest people in the villages where we worked, and therefore, we launched this program called Lighting a Million Lives. And then last year, when CGI gave us inspiration and encouragement by adopting this as a program, I said lighting a million lives is not enough, let's scale it up to Lighting a Billion Lives. This is a worldwide problem, and I think it's tragic. It's a shame for all of humanity to see so many people living in darkness and not having access to the best of technology that's available all over the world.

So we now have five states in India that are on board, and we're trying to expand this program to cover as many villages as possible. We mobilized some modest resources, but we're at the beginning, and I'm sure we'll get there.

What are the greatest challenges? Well, firstly, finding the right partners, because in any such program, there has to be quality, there has to be reliability, and the end objective has to be met by the initiative taken. We need to find donors, and I hope that even through this exercise, we would succeed in doing that. It's important to bring about cost reductions, and this is where research organizations and manufacturers have to work together in trying to do that.

The beauty of Lighting a Billion Lives is that it involves all stakeholders: NGOs, business, and government. It's critically important to do this in the developing countries. Why? Simply, because if we don't, then we would be replicating that which has been done in the developed world, and we know that has some very harmful consequences globally. We just cannot continue to pollute the atmosphere both at the local and the global level. And I want to give you one little example of when Mahatma Gandhi was asked whether he really wanted India to reach the same level of prosperity as Britain. His response was, "It took Britain the resources of half this planet to reach where it has. How many planets would India require?" And I think if we were to replicate what the developed world has done, then clearly we are going to run into some major problems and constraints.

What should we do next? Well, firstly, we need to build on this initiative, and some of the spillover benefits, some of the indirect benefits of this kind of effort are firstly women's empowerment. If you train a woman entrepreneur in a village, then clearly the status of women goes up substantially. She gets a source of income, and as it happens with people who have lighting in their homes beyond sunlight hours, they are able to practice their occupations, if they have cottage industry, if they are doing household activities that earn incomes, it extends the day for them, and the entire household, therefore, can increase its income. Children can study, adults can gain literacy, and all of these spillover benefits really add to the appeal of this program. It also helps to develop entrepreneurs, and you're creating an institutional mechanism at the local level which can be used for a variety of purposes.

So our intention is that once we've carried out this foundation of Lighting a Billion Lives, we can use this as a basis for a whole range of innovations, for a whole range of activities. If people realize that they have access to technologies and they have control over their resources, the next step would be for them to harness energy on a decent life basis or creating core chains for other such purposes. So I would say that this is just the beginning, but it's an exciting beginning, and I'm extremely grateful to be given this opportunity, and I deem it a major privilege to be able to speak before you, particularly in the presence and at the invitation of one of the greatest human beings we have in this world.

Thank you very much.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Thank you very much.

I may have missed the implication, but I think he was asking for contributions. And I say that in a serious as well as a light vein. This is a remarkable man. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for essentially establishing an international panel to give reputable evidence of progress of climate change, but in what he's doing in India, he's trying to solve a very local and personal problem to improve the quality of life in a way that also establishes a model to reduce the most calamitous consequences of climate change.

I believe, and I may be wrong about this, but I believe that in the 21st century, there will be an astonishing decentralization of the generation of energy in many places in the world beginning in the developing world, and it ought to be done with clean energy. There are countries all over Africa, for example, where 50 percent of the country is on an electric grid powered by a traditional energy source. A decision has to be made about how development will be supported in the rest of the countries. Can it be done with decentralized energy, with solar, with wind, and then you build up a critical mass so that it can be plugged into a centralized grid, and whatever you do from then on out will be done with clean, renewable energy? I believe the answer to that is yes.

I think you will see the same process with agriculture. We will have to learn to do more locally in a clean energy way, and so I think that this is profoundly important. Let me say one other thing. Many of you, like me, have been in villages around the world, and you see this particularly in Asian countries, where they do have some light, but it's all kerosene or paraffin, and it is truly frightening to think of the number of young children in this world who are growing up in houses that are highly flammable with this sort of lighting, breathing the fumes that are emitted from them. This is also a big health issue.

I wanted R.K. to come here today because of not only his eminence and credibility in fighting climate change, but also because he has a little idea with massive potential implications that will not only improve health and improve learning, but create an effect so that kids can study at night and people who work in agriculture in the daytime may have sewing jobs at night. I've seen all kinds of implications of this, but it also has enormous climate change implications and economic development implications in developing countries. I hope that this is a small foretaste of what we will see when CGI meets in Hong Kong in December. We are going to look for ways to bring CGI to Asia and involve more and more of the emerging successful entrepreneurs in Asia and the businesses there in solving the problems of that region. We hope to spread this to other regions of the world. I have to tell you, I've already had two offers to host one in Latin America this morning, so I think this is good, because we somehow have to create this synergy of what can be done by governments, by the private sector, and by the nongovernmental groups and the philanthropists of the world to get this kind of action going at a more rapid rate in every region.

So, I thank you very much. Next, I want to give you an idea of exactly what the thousand commitments that have already been made are achieving, and since I'm now going to smaller print on my text, you will have to forgive me if I put my glasses on. George Washington once said that he had gone blind in the service of his country. I am doing that in the service of my candidate. I hope you will forgive me.

Let me give you a brief summary here. Thanks to CGI commitments, over 20 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions have been averted. More than 3.2 million people have access to clean energy in developing countries. Twenty-seven mayors have agreed to significantly reduce the carbon footprints of their cities. That's over and above the work we're doing with our project with the mayors of the 40 largest cities in the world. More than 33 million people receive treatment with a global network for neglected tropical disease controls and rapid impact treatment packages, which can control these deadly diseases of poverty, listen to this, for just 50 cents per person per year. More than a quarter million HIV-infected individuals have received comprehensive care and more than 130,000 have initiated anti-HIV treatment with ARVs as a result of Columbia University's commitment to expand its international center for AIDS care and treatment programs.

One million and two hundred thousand patients throughout Sudan, Chad, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo have received emergency and primary care including mental health services through the International Medical Corps' Medical Health Services in Conflict-Affected Regions commitment. Over 270 microfinance institutions have received funding permitting access to finance for close to three million micro-entrepreneurs, and that's just the beginning. These are some of the most impressive commitments we've had made.

It is conceivable that if we keep going in this area, we can actually have a discernible, measurable impact in a lot of countries. When I was President, we used to give, just through our AIDS programs, about two million micro-enterprise loans a year through local groups, and we would finance that many. At the time, I thought to myself that the political climate in Washington was less hospitable, but United States should have been giving 50 million of these. Then, we could have challenged the world to meet us and we might have made it up to 100, 150, or 200 million. If you don't have a centralized banking system, you can change the lives of individuals and the lives of villages through microfinance. I've seen that done, but you can only change the life of a country if you can reach critical mass.

Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Prize after he had worked on this for 40 years, but it is worth noting that with all the political upheaval in Bangladesh in the last couple of years, they still had six percent growth last year. It's almost inconceivable that such growth could have occurred against as much political conflict as they had in a country at that stage of development had there not been an independently operating grassroots microfinance effort. This is something to think about. Think about how Liberia, even with a great President, is going to rapidly move out of 14 years of devastating conflict. What if we actually get the U.N. forces deployed and properly armed with enough communications equipment and with the proper rules of engagement in Darfur? How will we help them overcome what they have been through and do it in a hurry? I say that because this is a part of our commitment. We know these things work.

The question is: what do you have to do to take them to critical mass? The only real example we have on a national basis is the growth rate in Bangladesh against the political turmoil in the country. It took three decades to get there, but we know how to do this now. And it could be done much more rapidly in other areas when conflicts end or when potential exist even where there is conflict, so I leave that for your thinking.

I want to acknowledge now some very specific commitments here. Brian Walsh, the head of Global Social Engagement, Liquidnet Holdings, and Ann Heyman, the founder of Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village. Where are they? Stand up. Also a great thing about CGI, they have a partnership with them supporting the Agahozo-Shalom, which is building a village in Rwanda for young people orphaned by the genocide and replacing tragedy with hope. Good for you.

David Styleman, the CEO Americas of Standard Charter Bank. David, where are you? There he is. Over the next five years, Standard Charter Bank will underwrite $4 billion to $5 billion in debt and equity for renewable and clean energy projects with a total project value of $8 billion to $10 billion. The bank is also delivering on its 2006 commitment to provide development organizations and fund managers with $500 million worth of credit and financial instruments to use to microfinance Africa and Asia. As a result, the bank has formed 48 microfinance partnerships in 15 countries across these regions. The bank's portfolio has investments of $280 million benefiting an estimated 1.8 million people to date, 80 percent of whom are women.

I want to just say one thing about this for those of you who are impressed with that, and you should be if you're not. When our Foundation, not CGI, established this partnership with 40 cities on six continents to fight climate change, we decided to go for the low-hanging fruit. The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, started this, and then he got Mayor Bloomberg in New York involved. We have cities all over the world, including two in China and two in India, and a lot of these cities are already doing a lot of good work, but we set up a system to dramatically accelerate the retrofitting of buildings. We got five or six things going, but let me just talk about this to give you an example of why what David has done is so important.

We discovered that basically urban areas could participate in this with no increase in the city budget if we could simply raise enough money to get highly respected energy service organizations to go into the major structures that are energy users and give them analyses of how much they could reduce their greenhouse doing a certain number of things, and that if you paid these organizations a premium, they would actually guarantee the savings assuming the work was properly done.

Now, once that happens, banks will loan money for these projects contingent on being repaid only out of reduced utility bills. If they miss the target, the guarantor makes up the difference. Now, what this means is that any city, any hospital, any other public organization, or any university -- we have a partnership with all the universities in the country now -- can undertake these projects without taking anything out of their operating expenditures if there's some source to cover the energy service contract. This is a stunning thing. This is a win-win deal. So when you do this, the people who he's helping will create a whole bunch of new jobs proving that this is a growth generator, will train people to do work that could be done in most countries over a decade, and will be able to do it with a secure bank loan knowing the bank is going to get paid back with the energy service organization backing it up.

In one afternoon, we got five banks to commit $1 billion each for this work. That's the good news. Here's the bad news. When we did this the year before last, not quite two years ago, I learned to my horror that this $5 billion doubled the amount of money being spent on building retrofits in the entire world. Now, if you're in a developed country, this is the single, quickest, and easiest thing we can to do quickly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Goldman Sachs had a study last year that I got a copy of that said if United States, India, China, and Russia were simply to reach Japanese levels of energy efficiency, that would take us 25 percent of the way home to an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Five billion dollars is peanuts. That's one or two square blocks of New York City, maybe more now with property values going down, but you get the idea. It's no money. The world should be spending $200 billion on this, because all you have to do is set up the mechanism. In developed countries or medium income countries where there is massive unemployment in urban areas and in smaller communities, people could be trained to do this work. We could make much more rapid progress in the short run while we're trying to develop hydrogen cars and all this other stuff that we hope will be able to sustain us over the long run at a high standard of living with a carbon neutral footprint.

It's truly wonderful that we have more and more visionaries building carbon neutral office buildings. It is great that Green Building Council is certifying LEED buildings and now we're all rushing to have the top platinum certification. My Presidential Library got one last year, but it's peanuts compared to what could be done with this in terms of the immediate impact on climate change. What this man has done is important, but why aren't there 100 people equally committed? It's not like you're not going to get paid back. All you have to do is have the energy service organization give the guarantee. It is the nearest thing to a win-win free lunch I have ever seen in my life, and we are simply not organized to do it. Our Foundation, we're now retrofitting 100 percent of the public housing in New York, we're working with the mayor to do this, and it's going to cut the utility bills of New York public housing from $500 million a year to about $350 million. We're working on 660 elementary schools in Paris. This is something the developed world could do to carry our load in the fight against the climate change that is simply waiting for sufficient organization. So everybody who can should follow his lead. This is a very big deal, and we thank you very much.

Now I'd like to acknowledge Christian Peterson, the Co-Founder, Chair, and Chief Development Officer of NVIDIA. Where are you? Stand up. I love this project because of the neat names of the participants. Along with its partners, Cisco Systems and Lottomatica, NVIDIA has provided vital and highly sustainable information and communication technologies to more than 65 education, health care, economic development, and relief projects in 14 African nations. This is so important. There are so many people out there doing good things with no access to the latest information and no way to communicate with one another and no way to find out what their other options are, so I'm very grateful to you for this.

Well, I can tell you a thousand more stories, literally, but I wanted you to see directly what has been done. I want you to hear directly from a few of the people who are making a difference out there every day. First, I want to call on Martin Burt, the general manager of Fundación Paraguaya, to update us on their commitment to advance an interesting concept, education that pays for itself. Martin, where are you?

MR. MARTIN BURT: Good morning. Thank you very much for having us here. We are very proud to be part of the Clinton Global Initiative. We launched our commitment last year in September, and our objective is to reach 50 countries in the next 10 years and to reinvent education for the poor, incorporating entrepreneurial training to young rural farmers.

We launched the first international conference on financially self-sufficient free schools in Paraguay last December. We received 140 participants from 20 countries, and we are challenging other countries to reanalyze and reinvent education. Most poor in the world go to school, and they do not receive the learning and the tools they need to overcome poverty. We are now reaching about 30,000 children in these 13 countries of the 50 countries that we are going to profoundly affect. Thanks to the Clinton Global Initiative, we are working strongly with the Skoll Foundation, the Schwab Foundation, and the Avina Foundation to help us create an international network. We created a network called Teach a Man to Fish, and we now have 800 members from 80 countries, and we're also working with international NGOs like CARE, Christian Children's Fund, and sitting here with me are the friends from the Nike Foundation who are helping us develop the concept of financially self-sufficient schools for adolescent girls to empower them to become rural entrepreneurs.

So we would like to thank the Clinton Global Initiative. You're a marvelous team. Sharon Deutsch-Nadir, Marilia Bezerra, and Michele Kahane are really helping us move. We even were approached by a group of Swiss bankers who want to help us fund schools in Africa and in India. It's called the Alphamundi Group, so thank you so much for allowing this idea. The poor can help themselves out of poverty. They just need the knowledge and the training, and this can be delivered to them, so thank you very, very much for all your support.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Thank you. Let me ask you something, first of all, do you believe this is a model that can be replicated? Is the government in Paraguay going to help you to put in this every rural area of the country? What about poor schools in urban areas? Is there anything we can do there to make them self-supporting?

MR. BURT: Absolutely. We have a new government in Paraguay after 60 years of conservatism and fascism, so we're very happy to start this new.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: The guy gives a good speech, I hope he makes a good president. I was impressed.

MR. BURT: Mostly, we have to incorporate parents into the schools and tell parents that the school can have a cheese factory that teaches math through the cheese production, and the sale of the cheese can pay for the professors. That's basically the idea. Of course urban education can pay for itself, and it solves the problem of access to education and quality of education, so if there's anybody who is interested in promoting entrepreneurship for young people, please contact me, I'll stay here, and thank you.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Now, I find this fascinating, and because of its general application to developing countries all over the world, I was thinking that when I was in school, I actually can still remember that, it was relatively rare for anyone of my age in my home state to go to a four-year university. I mean, a minority of students did, but an enormous number of people were enrolled in vocational education, the training to do things that would generate money. But I knew of no school where they were actually trying to do this work and sell the product or the service or generate income. This may have actually some applications even in the United States now because of the enormous economic pressures on our schools, and they've all been aggravated by this Leave No Child Behind law. It's very interesting that 80 percent of the schools, a lot of you may not know this, in the last three years have cut back on history, economics, art, and music because of the mandates of this testing system. And I don't like it much or at all, but it's a fact.

I'm going to see whether or not we might even have some schools in America that just with the programs they already have in place can generate income, but nobody has thought about doing that before. It's a great idea. Let's give him another hand, that's great.

Next I want you to hear from a student who participated in the very first CGI university meeting in March. We brought more than 600 students from across the United States and 14 other nations to Tulane University in New Orleans to do exactly what we do at the annual CGI meeting, to make commitments to take action on their campuses, around their communities and in several cases, on other continents. Lizzy Dupont is here from the University of Texas at Austin to tell us about her commitment. Lizzy, where are you?

MS. LIZZY DUPONT: Thanks for having me here. My name is Lizzy Dupont. I'm a student at the University of Texas at Austin, and my commitment to action is called the Mali Science Project. Basically the goal of the project is to establish a video exchange program between students who are deaf in Austin, Texas, and Bamako, Mali in West Africa. The purpose of the videos is to get these students talking about public health issues that affect them in their communities or just public health issues that they're interested in, and it also serves a purpose to increase the social network for an often marginalized community. How I got involved was I studied abroad in Mali last fall, and I did my research paper on the development needs of the deaf education system in Bamako, so I lived in the School for the Deaf, and I basically observed classes and spent time with students and their families and studied the local sign language. Now, the good news is that sign language taught in schools is a derivative of American Sign Language. That's how this project is going to work.

But one of the things I learned there was that deaf students, especially when they have a huge communication barrier between them and their families or their health providers or even often their teachers, have trouble learning about how to lead healthy lives and protect themselves from things that are very preventable. So a lot of students were dealing with health problems that were easily preventable, easily treatable. So when I got back to Austin, I really wanted to do something to help, and I found this organization called UT for Rural Enhancement through Education and Design, and I started the Mali Science project. Now, this is a really big deal because there are over 200,000 deaf individuals in Mali, that's two percent of the population, and there are only five schools for the deaf. The first school was established in 1993, and so as you can imagine, there are a lot of priorities that need to be met. And they can't all be addressed at once, so health education, I found, was not one of the next priorities on the list of things to do among teaching teachers how to learn sign language and getting students to these schools in the first place.

So what I really hope to accomplish with this project is to promote health awareness not only for students in Bamako, but also the students in Austin and increase the social network. That's really going to benefit all the communities. So far we have affiliated with a couple of professors at the University in the American Sign Language and Linguistics Department as well as an adviser in services for students with disabilities. We're currently speaking with some faculty at Texas School for the Deaf, and I know we have the support of teachers at L'Ecole Deficient Auditif where I worked in Bamako. So hopefully we'll be getting the high school students involved soon.

That's the project. I really want to thank everyone here for the commitments you all have made. It's been amazing to hear what you're doing. And thanks to the Clinton Global Initiative for bringing us all together, because I really think that it's what we take away from events like this that drives us and fuels us when, you know, fighting the good fight gets hard, so thanks for creating this opportunity and thank you for having me here.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Wow, I'm not too worried about the future, are you? I would like to say one thing about Lizzy's project as a representative effort that we all have to consider. I believe the United States has become a far more decent place in the last 35 years, because of our commitment to empowerment of people with disabilities. I believe that a lot of developing countries are limiting their own potential because they do not have the capacity to empower their people with disabilities, and so I think that in addition to the incredibly compelling personal nature of this commitment, it should remind us that there are, because of technological advances, relatively low cost, high impact ways that those of us in the developed world could help to empower people in the developing world to get beyond their disabilities to make a contribution to their countries. That is what I consider to be the enormous larger significance of this, quite apart from its compelling moral and personal power.

You just heard her say that two percent of the population was deaf, and I saw you, Maurice, raise your eyes. It's really hard to imagine, but there are lots of developing countries where, because of various conditions, the incidence of specific disabilities are far higher than you would imagine them to be. Places where people with fine minds and stout hearts could have good lives if they had the kind of services that Lizzy's project is providing. So I ask you to think about that, because in these countries with large numbers of disabled people, they will either be tragic stories and drags on the potential of the country or a part of that country's future. It would be nice to see more and more of these nations avoid the trajectory that we had in the United States, and much of the rest of the world. We've got to learn from situations where people were basically segregated and set off for a century or more before we woke up not only to our moral obligations, but to our social blindness and not trying to empower people. This is a remarkable thing, and I thank you very much and I wish you well.

Now, I want to announce our first CGI commitment for this year. We always try to line a few people up before September so we'll know we'll have something to talk about when you guys show up. As many of you probably know, Visa, Inc. just went public with an IPO in March, and what is the very first CGI commitment of 2008? Visa is here to announce its commitment and their launch of a comprehensive corporate social responsibility program to focus on reaching the financially underserved all around the globe in order to help them expand their economic opportunities. Visa will provide financial literacy programs for ten million people around the world over the next five years.

So now I would like to introduce John Partridge, Chief Operating Officer at Visa, and Chris Jochnick from Oxfam America, and ask them to come on the stage to receive the first commitment certificate. And I'd like to ask John to deliver a few brief remarks. Let's give them a hand.

MR. JOHN PARTRIDGE: Thank you, President Clinton, and good morning. I feel privileged to be here today to announce the launch of Visa's corporate commitment. Everybody knows the Visa brand, but I want to spend a few moments and introduce you to Visa the company.

Visa is a global payment services company. We connect, through our network, over 16,000 financial institutions who have 1.6 billion cards in the marketplace, and those cards are used at 29 million merchant locations around the world. We truly enable global commerce.

What Visa is not: we do not issue cards. We do not set fees. We do not set interest rates. We do not lend credit. That is the job and the responsibility of the banks. This year we celebrate our 50th anniversary, but until very recently, we have been a membership association that has been owned by our banks, and all proceeds would go to the bank owners. We operated as six independent units with six board of directors and six management structures. We formed Visa Inc. six months ago, and as President Clinton just said, five weeks ago we became a publicly owned company when we completed the largest IPO in the history of the United States.

Under our old structure, philanthropic activity at Visa was regionally directed and not globally coordinated, and mostly conducted by our bank owners and not by Visa. But we believe that with public ownership comes a greater responsibility to corporate citizenship. In preparation for this change, we have been building a CSR program with the help of Business for Social Responsibility, our neighbors in San Francisco. Today, we are proud to launch our approach and our commitment.

As I described our framework, keep in mind that we are just embarking on this endeavor. We have a lot of work to do to make a difference. We believe the strength of our program is that it combines our payment expertise and products with our philanthropic efforts to make a greater impact.

The program has three pillars. First, Visa is committed to upholding the highest ethical business practices. Second, Visa is committed to playing a role in improving the well being of individuals around the world by working with leading humanitarian aid organizations that have the expertise and mission to help individuals in vulnerable communities. And third, we believe that through our combination of our payments expertise and expanding access to our products plus focused philanthropic efforts, Visa can play a role in addressing the long-term challenge of poverty. And that's why we're here today.

As we start, we believe that by simply making our products available to those in need, we can bring more people into the formal banking system and help reduce poverty. Access to financial services and electronic payments is a critical building block to enabling inclusive economic growth and the chance for all people to have the opportunity to improve their lives to lift themselves out of poverty.

Our commitment to bringing individuals economic self-sufficiency goes beyond the benefits of our core business. We also intend to build and fund projects that empower individuals from vulnerable communities to improve their lives by promoting entrepreneurship and small business development. We cannot do it alone. We intend to create a network of organizations with expertise in scale to partner with Visa to bring this program to life. Examples include supporting microfinance to help provide low income people access capital and unleash entrepreneurial talents that are critical to economic development in poorer countries. In developing new technologies and payment infrastructures, we can already see the huge opportunities that technology, like mobile payments, brings, making it possible for rural communities to have access to financial services.

And financial literacy, the most powerful financial tool today, is not a product; it's knowledge. We are committed to empowering people by helping them better understand and manage their finances and the responsibilities that come with owning a debit, a credit, or prepaid Visa card.

As you heard from President Clinton, over the next five years, we will help more than ten million people with financial literacy programs in the United States, South Africa, Russia, and elsewhere. But we have broader aspiration. Pinka, a leading microfinance organization, reports that 2.7 billion people live on less than $2 a day and more than half this group does not have access to financial services. We will reach this group by providing financial support and microfinance programs that foster entrepreneurship, and second and more sustainable, by expanding access to our products to those in need.

For example, Visa aspires to enabling millions of mobile phones in emerging markets as payment tools, which will accelerate the banking of the unbanked and help to grow small business. As I said, we cannot do this alone. We intend to partner directly with leading organizations that have the experience and mechanisms to help individuals in vulnerable communities in funding their programs and in codeveloping others. To jumpstart our program, we have joined forces with Oxfam America. Visa has made a three-year commitment to Oxfam where our funding and efforts will focus on broad humanitarian aid and on targeted programs devoted poverty alleviation. Chris Jochnick is here with me on stage. He is the Director of Oxfam's Private Sector Engagement. Chris, thank you. And I also again want to thank President Clinton and the Clinton Global Initiative team for providing Visa this opportunity. Thank you.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Thank you very much. I want to thank John and Chris, and let me say, ladies and gentlemen, my Foundation does a lot of this kind of work in America with Operation HOPR, John Bryant's organization. There are 28 million Americans, to give you an example, who get a regular paycheck either every two weeks or every month who don't even have a bank account. There's no way they're going to have a Visa card, because they don't even have a bank account. They don't even have an ATM card. And we see, even in a country at our level of development, an appalling lack of literacy, which has significant not only personal consequences to the people involved, but to the larger economy. I believe there is enormous potential here in this project, and we're honored that it's the first one to be announced.

Let me just remind you all of what you already know as we close. The reason we are here is that most of us are on the upside of the profound, yawning gaps in opportunity in this interdependent world and the persistent inequality in income, employment opportunities, health care, and education that we see all around the world. Most of us have done quite well in a world organized to burn up the planet unless we figure out how to reorganize, because most of us are relatively immune from the terror and violence and the health crisis that makes life so insecure for so many. And in the modern world those of us who do not have government office but do have knowledge and the ability to organize and deliver goods or services or knowledge to others have an opportunity never before enjoyed by private citizens in all of human history: to have both local and global impact. But no matter where we come from or how much money we make or how much time we have to give, we know that being an aware citizen imposes on us an obligation to make whatever difference we can.

So we heard the CEO of a major corporation. We heard a young student. They have one thing in common. They are global citizens with global reach. Since we can't escape our interdependent world, we had better make the most of it, and I think you can see from the immensely impressive presentations today that doing so can make a difference and is immensely rewarding.

I look forward to seeing you in September. Thank you very much.