I think the whole progress over the last two or three millennia has been entirely dependent on ideas and techniques and commodities and people moving from one part of the world to another. It seems difficult to take an anti-globalization view if one takes globalization properly in its full sense.

Education could be a great vehicle for gender equity. It allows people to see what your rights are by reading. Quite often women, for example, may have rights that they are not in the position to actually make use of.

I think that so many of our abilities to do things depend on interaction with each other.

If the government is vulnerable to public opinion, then famines are a dreadfully bad thing to have. You can’t win many elections after a famine, and you don’t like being criticized by newspapers, opposition parties in parliament, and so on. Democracy gives the government an immediate political incentive to act.

Belonging to humanity is a great thing for us, and I think the schools can do it. So I think we can look after the quality of education on the school even as we expand the availability of schooling.

I really do believe that education, despite this massive potential in transforming human lives, has not received the kind of attention that people should have given to it.

Anything that increases the voice of young women tends therefore to reduce the fertility rate.