Top 10 Quotes from the White House Summit on Global Development

July 27, 2016 By Sung Lee

At last week’s White House Summit on Global Development, held at the U.S. Agency for International Development, civil society leaders, development experts, and private sector partners gathered to recognize progress we made in global development.

The biggest news from the summit was signing of the Global Food Security Act into law, which authorized more than $7 billion toward ending global hunger and poverty through agricultural development. According to newly released results, Feed the Future helped over 9 million farmers and reduced poverty as much as 26 percent in areas where Feed the Future works.

Check out these 10 quotes that capture the richness of the discussions:
  

  1. Development is smart investment

“Development isn’t charity.  It’s one of the smartest investments we can make in our shared future — in our security and our prosperity.” – President Barack Obama
  

  1. Food security is national security

“If we can find people opportunities in agriculture and employment, and we can feed hungry people, we are going to be all safer as a result.” – Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture
  

  1. Transparency and accountable are key to development

“Transparency, accountability, and open government are needed to unlock economic development and progress.” – Samantha Power, U.S. Ambassador to United Nations
  

  1. Development through partnership

“For the first time in 50 years, the U.S. administration broke with the tradition and looked at development from a partnership perspective and talked to countries about having a roadmap that they can rally behind and support.” – Agnes Kalibata, President, Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa
  

  1. Development is bipartisan

“We’ve worked hand-in-hand with the people who build PEPFAR to do 2.0 and 3.0. We have enjoyed a bipartisan support for health that I think has been the foundation to what we have on Power Africa and Feed the Future.” – Gayle Smith, Administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development
  

  1. Enormous progress on global health

“Over the past 15 years, our partnerships and investments to fight Malaria have reduced the deaths among children under the age of 5 by 65 percent, averting an estimated 6.2 million deaths. PEPFAR now supports 9.5 million people on Antiretroviral, that’s a nearly four-fold increase since 2009 and resulted in more than 1.5 million babies being born without AIDS.” – Susan Rice, National Security Advisor
  

  1. Public and private partnerships

“Private businesses are investing in things that were once in exclusive domains of government budgets and donors – private schools, health clinics, power, and transportation.” – Elizabeth Littlefield, President, Overseas Private Investment Corporation
  

  1. Empowering youth

“The youth bulge is a reality and it is a tremendous opportunity.  We know that tapping into the energy and ideas of this inspiring generation will be critical to ending poverty.” – Dana Hyde, CEO, Millennium Challenge Corporation
  

  1. New innovative partnerships and tools

“Our mindset is shifting from “aid” to “beyond aid.” More partners: engage with more people. More experimentation: be willing to experiment fast and if it works expand it quickly.  More instruments.  More stakeholders. And more evidence-based and outcome based approaches.” – Mohamed A. El-Erian, Chair, President’s Council on Global Development
  

  1. Expanding access to energy

Without access to power, “the engines of growth such as education, healthcare and business, can’t quite get started in the way they should in Africa.” – Leocadia Zak, Director, the U.S. Trade and Development Agency