Bill Gates Quotes

Development must be such that it positively transforms the lives of the common people.

I think people are hungry for new ideas and leadership in the world of poverty alleviation. Most development programs are started and led by people with Ph.Ds in economics or policy. Samasource is part of a cadre of younger organizations headed by entrepreneurs from non-traditional backgrounds.

Infrastructure alone won't end poverty. The World Bank had to learn this lesson, too. While we believed too much in bricks and mortar in our early days, we now understand that bringing together funding, technical expertise, and tested knowledge goes much further.

I have always believed that the ultimate purpose of economic policies and development policy is to meet the basic needs of our people. And for that, we need a fast-expanding economy.

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.

Economic development cannot take a nation forward on its own. We need a society and economy which complement each other. We need to take care of the poor, deprived and left behind sections of society.

Where micro-finance focuses on small loans to individual, low-income women, think of Acumen Fund more like a venture capital fund.

We spend billions on international aid annually, but we don't find ways to connect people to dignified work. I realized that if we don't think about ways to harness private capital to solve problems, we're leaving large amounts of money on the table and doing ourselves a disservice.

You cannot achieve environmental security and human development without addressing the basic issues of health and nutrition.

There's a lot of work being done through the innovation arm of the World Bank, at the World Bank Institute. There's a lot of work that we at the Rockefeller Foundation are doing and funding towards that end, and increasingly, the U.S. government is getting engaged.

Humanitarian help will never solve any problems. It is necessary to help us create some kind of economic infrastructure.

China is a developing country and we regard subsistence as the fundamental human right.

We will focus on the Zambian people as both the end and the means of development

Growth and prosperity. These are the blocks with which we must build our welfare society.

It is past time to acknowledge that economic growth … is good, and that what the world needs is more of it.

… authors generally neglect that growth has lifted billions of people out of grinding poverty and that others may remain poor because of the developed world’s environmental concerns …

If you get to think of sharing wealth with people who need it and the purposes that need it, it gives a very different sense of satisfaction. I think I can build an institution which is very unlike the Gates' foundation. Gates' foundation is totally project-driven, that will serve a specific purpose and then self-destruct.

I was encouraged to break all the rules but to take the best of philanthropy, the best of investing, and the best of development finance, and experiment with new ways to create this venture capital model of using philanthropy to back patient capital investments, and then build solutions that were measured in terms of the kind of impact and change they were making on people's lives and in the world, not just on the financial return.

The only way to end poverty, to make it history, is to build viable systems on the ground that deliver critical and affordable goods and services to the poor, in ways that are financially sustainable and scaleable. If we do that, we really can make poverty history.

I'm not giving away oil for free. Just using oil, first to benefit our people, to relieve poverty.

Economic growth without investment in human development is unsustainable - and unethical.

Traditional charity and aid are never going to solve the problems of poverty.

We hope that more assistance will be available to the nations of the region, to include Egypt, on the three pillars that I discussed today: civic society development, education and economic development.

My development parameter is very simple. It is about how the poorest of the poor can benefit from development.

We must together build an economic agenda for the India of our dreams that translates into improved standards of living, increased human well-being and assured social justice.