If you want to lift up an economy in Africa, you basically start with the women.

Sanitation issues in the developing world affect women more than they affect men.

The biggest pieces of work that we do are vaccines, because those save lives, and also family planning. Because if a woman can space the births of her children, it changes everything for her health and her child's health.

A woman with a voice is by definition a strong woman. But the search to find that voice can be remarkably difficult.

I think the Americans need to understand that a lot of times the children are bored in school, and that is why they are not staying in.

Even in our own agriculture strategy, if we got a great new drought-resistant seed and we managed to get it distributed in the system, we just assumed that it would reach female farmers. That's a false assumption, because women don't interact with agro-dealers. So if you don't develop specific programming to ensure that seed gets in a woman's hands, then the extra income [generated by higher-yielding crops] goes into her husband's hands.

When I look at 225 million women who want contraceptives, and then I look at the 52 million unintended pregnancies that could be avoided by addressing this unmet need, where can we have the biggest impact with our voice, our dollars, our partners? It's on contraceptives. I would rather address the problem upstream.