Helene D. Gayle Quotes

If you educate a girl, you educate a nation.

The environmental movement could do a better job incorporating the message about the connection between poverty and environmental degradation, and building that message at the grassroots level.

There is no doubt that a woman's economic empowerment is very much interconnected to her health and the well being of her children.

Early marriage is most prevalent in communities suffering deep, chronic poverty.

The difference between rich and poor is becoming more extreme, and as income inequality widens the wealth gap in major nations, education, health and social mobility are all threatened.

Learn to forgive yourself and move on.

Any discussion of investment or putting monetary value on the environment must start with the populations who rely on those resources.

There are plenty of risks when we encourage "investment" or commoditization of natural resources, as power dynamics may mean that poor people (who are often marginalized and have less power) are sidelined by more powerful interests when money is involved.

As many as half of Ethiopias girls become wives before becoming adults. But Ethiopia is also a place where lasting solutions to child marriage are starting to make a difference.

The environmental community has an opportunity to create and leverage partnerships with the development community on social issues, rather than trying to develop new expertise of its own.

You can't marginalize more than half of the globe's population and expect to see any meaningful solutions to the problems that ail the world.

We always say at CARE that we would love to see if we can work ourselves out of business.

No matter how you measure it, women and girls bear the brunt of poverty. But it's also clear that women are also our greatest hope for ending it. We at CARE have long believed that if you change the life of a girl or woman, you don't just change that individual, you change her family and then her community.

What keeps me motivated is going out to the field and seeing programs that incorporate a focus on both people and the planet, and seeing how mutually reinforcing they can really be.

When a child is starving, a family may not be able to think about long-term sustainability or damage to ecosystems that support endangered species.