For lack of a few pinches of ordinary iodised table salt in the diet of a third world pregnant mother, a child can lose up to ten IQ (Intelligence Quotient) points.

It's no accident that the countries that have enjoyed an economic take off have been those that educated girls and then gave them the autonomy to move to the cities to find work

Our focus has to be on changing reality, not changing laws.

Women are not the problem they're the solution

One of the best ways to fight poverty and to fight terrorism is to educate girls and bring women into the formal labor force.

Decades from now, people will look back and wonder how societies could have acquiesced in a sex slave trade in the twenty-first century that is... bigger than the transatlantic slave trade was in the nineteenth. They will be perplexed that we shrugged as a lack of investment in maternal health caused half a million women to perish in childbirth each year.

When the history of African development is written, it will be clear that a turning point involved the empowerment of women.