When the Berlin Wall fell and suddenly all those countries had burgeoning democracies, women were still being left out. The big turning point, about ten years ago, was moving from a notion of empowering women to actually looking at where you can make the most difference, and it's in a girl's life.

If you can get to a girl and make a difference in her life, you're actually going to have a greater impact on a woman's life. If you don't get to her as a girl, you may not be able ever to help her as a woman.

Young people aren't the leaders of tomorrow. They are the leaders of today and tomorrow.

The resilience and the resourcefulness of people to make a better life, to survive, to give their children something better than they had, is so inspiring. I look at how hard it must be to get up every day and fight that battle and I think, Wow, anything I'm doing just has to be in service.

Gender data is important. If girls don’t have a birth certificate, how do we know how many are marrying as children?

Tomorrow is Now... If we act, 2015 can be a year for the history books. It can be the year that we put the world on the path to end extreme poverty; the year we place sustainability at the heart of our future; and the year that we agree that every person should be able to lead a life of dignity and opportunity.

Being poor is not like being a victim. Being poor means that you don't have one resource.