Investing in women is smart economics, and investing in girls, catching them upstream, is even smarter economics.
Interpretation
Investing in women and girls is not only beneficial for them personally but also advantageous for the economy as a whole.
The quote by Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala emphasizes the importance of investing in women and girls, suggesting that such investments bring considerable economic returns. By focusing on girls and enabling their potential early, society can harness a smarter economic strategy that leads to sustainable development and improved outcomes for communities.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about budget allocations for educational programs targeting girls.
When I became finance minister, they called me Okonjo-Wahala - or 'Trouble Woman.' It means 'I give you hell.' But I don't care what names they call me. I'm a fighter; I'm very focused on what I'm doing, and relentless in what I want to achieve, almost to a fault. If you get in my way, you get kicked.
I'm trying to tell you that there's a new wave on the continent. A new wave of openness and democratization in which, since 2000, more than two-thirds of African countries have had multi-party democratic elections. Not all of them have been perfect, or will be, but the trend is very clear.
The best way to help Africans today is to help them to stand on their own feet. And the best way to do that is by helping create jobs.
When you save the life of anyone, a farmer, a teacher, a mother, they are contributing productively into the economy.
I felt Nigeria didn't have to succumb to the image of being a corrupt country; we didn't have to let the economy stagnate.
I know what it means to go to the stream to fetch water... what it means when people are poor and don't have enough to eat. It's not enough to say you know about poverty. You have to live it.
They will come to learn in the end, at their own expense, that it is better to endure competition for rich customers than to be invested with monopoly over impoverished customers.
If anything, taxes for the lower and middle class and maybe even the upper-middle class should even probably be cut further. But I think that people at the high end - people like myself - should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we've ever had it.
One way to have broader access to wealth is to reduce the tax on the large group and increase the tax on the very top so concentration of wealth doesn't get to extreme levels.
No matter how the financial system is set up, no matter what the economic system is, as long as you have people, you're going to have financial crises; you're going to have bubbles that manifest themselves in the financial system.
Unfair servicing practices can worsen a family's already difficult economic situation, and the injury echoes from the family to the community and ultimately throughout the economy.
To get back to the kind of shared prosperity and upward mobility we once considered normal will require another era of fundamental reform, of both our economy and our democracy.
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