Being poor doesn't mean being ordinary.

On the one hand, I loved being a banker. I loved how numbers could tell a story and how you can invest in ideas and see them translate into products and services and create jobs. What I didn't like, particularly where I was working in Brazil during the debt crisis of the early '80s, was how the poor were excluded from the banking system. I made the decision to try and experiment with whether we could use the tools of banking to extend the benefits of the economy to the poor.

My whole life has been spent with people who have taken every knock in the world. No advantages. Yet they greet you with a big smile, they give you what they have, and they keep coming back. They are the fighters.

If indeed we can create systems that allow individuals to access goods and services like health and housing and energy and water, in a way that they can afford, they'll all have greater choice, greater opportunity, greater dignity.

What we call people so often distances us from them, and makes them little.

The only way we really create change is to enter any situation with the humility to listen and to recognize the world as it is, and then the audacity to dream what it could be.

We have to remember that the girls and the women are most isolated and violated and victimized and made invisible in those very societies where our men and our boys feel disempowered, unable to provide.