REMARKS BY ANNE C. RICHARD AT INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON POPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT

FROM:  U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT 

Democracy, Human Rights, Refugees: The International Conference on Population and Development: A 20 Year Review

09/10/2014 12:55 PM EDT

The International Conference on Population and Development: A 20 Year Review

Remarks

Anne C. Richard

Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration

Plenary Session on the ICPD +20, Dean Acheson Auditorium

Washington, DC

September 9, 2014

It is an honor to be here on this the 20th anniversary of one of the great milestones in the history of global development. The International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo changed the whole conversation. Instead of just counting people we recognized how each person counts, has rights, and should be empowered to make his or her own choices.

This had profound consequences. 179 governments pledged to make access to reproductive healthcare and family planning services a basic right, to fight infant, child, and maternal mortality and to do a better job of educating women and girls.

Civil society deserves a lot of credit for this. Non-governmental organizations were there in force. Not just outside, or as adversaries, but as full participants. This was unprecedented. You had a master plan, common messaging, and even a daily bulletin that delegates themselves used to stay on top of the conference and to find out what was going on.

Two decades later you continue to drive progress. When political will ebbs, and back sliding is a real possibility, civil society holds the line. Universal access to reproductive health became a target under the Millennium Development Goals, only after you pushed hard and long for this. During the recent UN Open Working Group meetings on post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals, sexual and reproductive health was a low priority for some. You leapt in, alerted friendly governments and helped us get sexual and reproductive health into the health goal and reproductive rights into the gender goal, linked to women’s empowerment and equality. We believe these could be some of the most transformative goals in the Post-2015 Development Agenda.

We also count on you at the annual meeting of the UN Commission on Population and Development, as it carries out its responsibility to review our progress in implementing the ICPD Program of Action. There, you and non-governmental organizations from the global south remind us, again and again that enlightened policies and effective programs are a matter of life and death. Your work has been instrumental in coaxing governments to make the additional commitments needed to keep the promises made in Cairo.

You were right to argue, as you have for years, that clinics treating pregnant women for HIV/AIDS should also offer contraceptive services, and that family planning services tailored only for married couples may put young, single people at risk. The CPD resolutions reflect these realities.

Civil society helps us inside the U.S. government as well. One reason the State Department’s annual Human Rights Report now covers reproductive rights is because advocates and service providers convinced top officials that this was needed.

Your research is as essential as your advocacy. The Guttmacher Institute demonstrated that access to modern contraception does not just save lives, empower women, and reduce poverty. It also saves money! Guttmacher’s research found that the $4 billion spent annually on contraceptive care in developing countries actually saves $5.6 billion on the cost of medical care for mothers and newborns. This makes not just health ministries, but influential finance ministries sit up and take notice. Another widely accepted figure that came from Guttmacher is that an estimated 222 million women in the developing world want to avoid or delay pregnancy but still lack the means to do this.

The barriers are geographic, economic, practical and cultural. And we need civil society’s help to overcome them. You are in the field, figuring out what women need and how they can get it.

Take the case of injectable contraceptives. These once had to be administered by doctors and nurses. With USAID’s support, FHI360 conducted research in Uganda and Madagascar showing that community health workers with minimal education could provide them safely. As a result, thirteen African countries now permit this practice.

Civil society groups figure out how to help at-risk, underserved populations including youth. In Liberia, Population Services International developed tools and provided training for family planning and reproductive clinics. Participating clinics were able to serve 15 times more young people and distribute 36 times more contraceptives to youth than they had before.

You also reach the hardest-to-reach places. Marie Stopes International brings family planning services to women and men in 30,000 isolated urban shanty towns and remote rural locations in 26 countries. It has even transported supplies by mule and camel train. MSI offers temporary “Saturday” family planning clinics advertised in local markets and by word of mouth. Women stream in, voluntarily seeking everything from short term methods, to sterilization.

Marie Stopes also helps poor communities set up their own high quality clinics and pharmacies, by explaining what’s needed, training local staff, and offering discounted contraceptives and medical supplies. Last year, while I was in Ethiopia for the International Family Planning Conference, I learned more about this when I visited the Alemu Blue Star Clinic.

On an earlier trip to Burkina Faso, I visited a Rama Foundation recovery center for women and girls ravaged by obstetric fistula. I heard their heartbreaking stories, and met women who had suffered for decades, abandoned by their husbands and families. The Rama Foundation arranges surgery, and gives women a place to stay, learn a trade and rebuild their lives.

As you know, many girls develop obstetric fistula because they give birth before their bodies are ready. Every year, two million girls under age 14 become mothers and most of these girls are married.

NGOs and civil society groups do more than offer medical treatment and contraceptive services. You work to change the attitudes that imperil girls’ bodies, their dreams, and their rights.

Civil society groups know that you cannot end centuries old traditions like child, early and forced marriage by just showing up and saying “don’t do that.” In eight countries across West Africa, an award winning NGO called Tostan sends locally based facilitators who stay in communities for three years. They help people speak openly about what happens when very young girls are forced to marry. Communities discuss the reasons for this practice, like the fear that unmarried girls will be raped or bring dishonor to their families. And together they think of other solutions.

Tostan and other NGOs figure out how to educate and communicate in ways that respect local cultures and make sense to people who cannot read and know little of the wider world. They work with community gatekeepers – traditional and religious leaders – who can empower communities to use family planning, just by signaling their approval.

We need your extraordinary reach, your patience, your passion, your grass-roots connections and experience to make the vision of Cairo real. We promised empowerment and that is not so simple. Enabling people to decide if and when to have children is just part of it. Empowerment happens not in conference rooms but out in the real world in the communities where you work.

On behalf of our government, I want to thank you for being such formidable allies and valued partners now and in the years ahead.

SEC. OF STATE HILLARY CLINTON SPEAKS AT GLOBAL IMPACT ECONOMY FORUM

FROM:  U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT
Remarks at the Global Impact Economy Forum
Remarks Hillary Rodham Clinton
Secretary of State Loy Henderson Auditorium
Washington, DC
April 26, 2012
Thank you. Oh, thank you all very much. Thank you. Thank you, all. Thank you. That was perfect timing, bottoms up. I loved hearing that as I walked in. Thanks to Kris Balderston, his staff in our office of the Global Partnership Initiatives, and everyone here who has helped to plan this forum providing us a lot of great advice and counsel.

I’m also delighted to welcome Sir Richard Branson. Thank you so much for being here. I love the fact that he is such a strong proponent for business as unusual. And I’m excited he’s here because many, many, many years ago, I wanted to be an astronaut, and I think he may be my last chance to live out – (laughter) – that particular dream.

You’re here because you know that we have an opportunity with the convergence of the recognition on the part of government, the private sector, civil society, that we can be so much more effective working together than working at cross-purposes. And for me, this is a great moment to look at where we stand in the world in the pursuit of economic growth and prosperity that is broadly inclusive and sustainable. You know the statistics as well as anyone: One out of three people in the world today living on less than $2 a day; the challenges we face from finite resources, climate change, and other environmental degradation; looking at how people themselves are being empowered from the bottom up in large measure because of the phenomenon of social media. And it’s not only happening somewhere out there, it’s happening everywhere.

And the fact is, these trend lines, apart from the headlines that we all spend most of our time looking at, are profoundly important to foreign policy and national security of all of our countries, because governments everywhere, including most particularly our own, are grappling with what challenges like these mean for our citizens. We believe expanding economic opportunity is fundamental to achieving our own national interest. We want more prosperous societies. We want to see people moving into the middle class. We want to see that creativity and entrepreneurial spirit fostering growth. And we have been working within the Obama Administration to bring our various institutions together to try to put forth that as a focus for us.

So the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Department of Commerce, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, many other of our own institutions working together with international and multilateral institutions are trying to crack the code on removing the obstacles that limit growth. But we have to be more intentional about it. And that’s part of what this forum is meant to both represent, but far more importantly, help us achieve.

And we recognize that so called official development assistance is no longer the leading edge indicator or tool that it used to be. In the 1960s, official development assistance represented about 70 percent of capital flows into developing nations. Today that number is about 13 percent. Where does the rest come from? Well, you know it comes from the private sector, comes from increased trade revenues, it comes from the flow of remittances, and any number of other non-governmental sources. So we’ve made it a goal of this Administration to do more to engage with and coordinate with the private sector, non-profits, philanthropists, diasporas, and anyone else who has value to add.

We know we need partnerships and innovative alliances, which is why one of the first things I did at the State Department was to set up this Office of Global Partnerships. We needed to tear down the silos that prevented us from working creatively and smartly together. We needed to facilitate and scale up the impact economy. And we needed to make it clear that we were over the separation mentality that for too long has guided our efforts.

What do I mean by that? Well, in the past, we looked at corporate revenue and corporate responsibility as separate concerns. We looked at government activity and everything else as separate concerns. Now we know that there’s so much out there that is happening but may not be shared broadly enough so that it both inspires and catalyzes others to do the same. There is a market waiting to be filled in every corner of this world.

So if we can open the doors to new markets and new investments, we can tap as many as 1.4 billion new mid-market customers with growing incomes in developing countries. Taken together, they represent more than $12 trillion in spending power. That’s a huge potential customer base, not only for American companies, which is my primary concern, but also for others. So when we make investments from the three stools of this strategy, official development assistance, not-for-profit philanthropic assistance, private sector investments, we are not only helping to grow and strengthen middle classes in developing nations, we are also supporting the businesses that create jobs here at home. We know that working with the private sector can bolster both our foreign policy interests and our development efforts. But we hope the private sector knows that working with government and civil society also offers value. And increasingly our goals, I would argue, overlap.

Consider just a few examples: Each year, India’s farmers produce nearly 200 million metric tons of rice and wheat, but they lose nearly one-tenth of it after harvest. Just the portion of grain that farmers lose because they don’t have a good way to dry and store their crops would feed about 4 million additional people. And I believe that Sachpreet Chandhoke is here today. Is Sachpreet here? Yes, yes. Well, last year, she led a team of students from Kellogg School of Management to take on this challenge. They designed and pitched the Grain Depot Fund as part of the International Impact Investing Challenge. They proposed building village-level warehouses where local farmers can access the proper equipment to dry their crops and store them, protected from insects, humidity, and theft. Investors in these warehouses will see returns of almost 20 percent while also helping prevent the needless loss of grain, increasing the farmers’ incomes by as much as 15 percent, and creating dozens of local jobs around the storage centers. So with numbers like that, it’s easy to see why Sachpreet and her colleagues won the competition. (Applause.)

Or look at northern Haiti. With its proximity to the U.S. market, the area has great potential to be a regional manufacturing hub. But for decades, despite interest, there was a lack of industrial facilities, limited electric supply, inadequate ports, which all held back private investment. Today, the north of Haiti ranks as one of Haiti’s poorest regions, and of course, Haiti is the poorest country in our hemisphere.

So last year, working with the Government of Haiti and the Inter-American Development Bank, the State Department facilitated a $500 million public-private partnership with the leading Korean garment manufacturer Sae-A. This partnership will develop a globally competitive industrial park in northern Haiti, one of the largest in the Caribbean. It will include an onsite power plant, a waste water treatment facility, and executive residences. Sae-A has projected that it will create 20,000 jobs by 2016 and they will be investing more than $70 million in northern Haiti. The region will continue to benefit from ongoing investments in housing and health clinics, a new container port, and electrification projects for the towns surrounding the industrial park. Sae-A began moving into the first two new 100,000 square feet factory buildings this week, and we expect other tenants to follow later in the year.

At a larger level, our Overseas Private Investment Corporation offers institutional proof that impact investing works. Throughout its 40-year history – and is Elizabeth Littlefield here, our current head of OPIC? – they have been making investments with positive social and environmental returns at the same time as OPIC has generated a profit for American taxpayers. Last year, OPIC issued a call for proposals to catalyze a greater commitment to impact investing. And so far, it has approved $285 million in financing for six new funds that will invest in projects improving job creation, healthcare, combating climate change, and the like.

These are just a few of the examples I could give you of what we are really focused on making happen. And that’s why we are sponsoring and hosting this Global Impact Economy Forum. You’re here because you understand creating shared value is actually in all of our interest. We need all the potential partners, not only here, but who are not in the room, to understand that as well. Our goal is to create an inclusive economic ecosystem that fosters this kind of investing.

So today, I’m proud to announce two exciting new partnerships. USAID – I don’t know if Raj Shah – is Raj here? Ah, oh good, you’re here. USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures, or DIV, invests in breakthrough development solutions that truly have the potential to change millions of lives at a fraction of the usual cost. And now, through a new Global Development Alliance between USAID and the Skoll Foundation – I don’t know if Jeffrey Skoll is here as well – we are dedicating more than $40 million to focus on scaling up game-changing innovations that are cost-effective and sustainable.

This was one of Raj’s and my principal goals when we both came into our positions. It is obviously important to provide humanitarian relief when people are starving because of bad government policies that undermine agricultural development or because of drought or other acts of nature. But it’s better to get ahead of the curve and to invest in new, more effective agricultural production. It’s fine to set up clinics, to take care of people when they’re sick or they’re suffering from disease, but it’s better to get ahead of it and to find interventions like bed nets that will actually prevent disease in the first place. So we’re investing a lot of money in Development Innovation Ventures because we think it will save money, but we need private sector support and ideas as well.

Secondly, we are committed to doing development and diplomacy differently. That’s why I commissioned the first-ever Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review to take a hard look at ourselves and make sure we knew what we were doing that worked and do more of it and stop what we were doing that didn’t work. So our second program is part of our ongoing investing with impact initiative. It’s called Accelerating Market-Driven Partnerships, or AMP. It’s very important in Washington you get a good acronym – (laughter) – so people spend a lot of time trying to figure out what the initials will sound like. AMP will bring a business eye to taking on social and environmental problems in developing markets. We will launch it in Brazil, focused first on building sustainable cities, from providing low-cost housing, to offering skills training that builds capacity of local workers, to improving urban waste management systems. AMP will draw on the resources of the private sector, civil society, and multilateral partners in both Brazil and the United States, including Arent Fox, Machado Associados, Grupo ABC, HP, the Rockefeller Foundation, the World Bank Group, and Mercy Corps.

So we’re bringing a whole-of-government approach and a broad base of partners to this, creating an innovation toolkit looking at the critical elements necessary to strengthen science and technology to support entrepreneurship and innovation. We’ll be sending our first innovation delegation to Brazil. We’re collaborating with Department of Housing and Urban Development through the Energy and Climate Partnership of the Americas to advance this initiative. If it proves successful in Brazil, we’ll obviously want to expand it and invite you to join us.

Now, I’m not the only one who will be announcing new commitments today. Many of you are here to do the same. This forum fundamentally is built on the idea we don’t have to choose between doing well and doing good. The only choice we have to make is to do better – do better in government, do better in business, do better in civil society. And one thing is clear: We cannot solve our problems or address our challenges without working together. That goes for countries working together and all of us as well. So I have high hopes for this forum. I thank everybody who has been contributing to it to bring it to reality, and I look forward to working with you on the partnerships and opportunities that it helps to midwife for all of us. Thank you very much. (Applause.)