The new millennium began with a great global dream. World leaders gathered at the United Nations in 2000 and adopted, among others, a historic goal to reduce poverty by half by 2015. Never in human history had such a bold goal been adopted by the entire world in one voice, one that specified time and size.

People need such a small amount of money to deal with their own daily life. Because wherever I went to school they taught me about millions of dollars. I dealt with billions of dollars in national plans and investment plans and so on. Not this tiny money, $27 for 42 people.

Poverty does not belong in civilized human society. Its proper place is in a museum. That's where it will be.

What I learned in school, what I learned in the educational part of my life. Trying to acquire a kind of a bird's eye view. You drive hard and see everything. And that's called education because now you can see everything.

Charity only perpetuates poverty by taking the initiative away from the poor.

I'm sure everything has a bearing on what I'm doing. My family is a lower-middle-class family, there's lots of children, seven brothers, two sisters grew up together, fighting with each other, went to school. My mother went to school up to 4th grade. My father went to school up to 8th grade. So that's about the education level we had in the family.

I was trained to become an economist and I finished my work and I was teaching and did my PhD so I thought I did that. I prepared myself for that kind of road. But then I realized that I had not learned enough to solve the problem of poverty. So I distanced myself from the things that I learned and tried to learn anew about people.