Hillary Addresses CARE Conference
By Liz Wing on 05/11/2010 @ 05:28 PM
Today I attended Secretary Clinton's Keynote Address at the CARE Conference. The room was packed with hundreds of conference attendees. Secretary Clinton spoke about childhood nutrition and praised CARE for their programs that focus on improving the health and lives of so many people across the globe. She made the case for why Development is a core pillar of the State Department, along with Diplomacy and Defense. She made a statement that resonates with me:
"I often tell people as I travel around the world, 'If you want to know how stable a country is, don’t count the number of advanced weapons, count the number of malnourished children.'"
She talked about why she believes there should be a focus on the health and empowerment of women and children:
"Well, we focus on women because all of the research going back decades demonstrates the best development strategies are focused on women; that focusing on a woman, helping a woman get better nutrition, getting access to credit, getting education, improves life for the families. We focus on children because they’re children. They didn’t have anything to do with the situations into which they were born. They didn’t have any role to play in the governments that govern them and their families."
"In my many years of working in this area, the Children’s Defense Fund and in so many other settings, I’ve always seen how talent is universal, but opportunity is not. I honestly believe that we could go anywhere in the world today, into the poorest parts of the poorest communities, and you would find children who, with the right health and the right education, could be the next generation of doctors and business leaders and government leaders, and who could contribute to the world that they are inheriting from us."
According to UNICEF, last year was the record low in children dying before age 5. It was 9 million children. We can do better. With the work of CARE and so many other organizations we can we can make the future much brighter for generations to come.
To watch the speech or read the transcript, please click here.
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