Clinton and the Clinton Global Initiative

Former President Clinton hosted a press conference today - my first presidential press conference and there I was in the second row (yeah bloggers!). Whatever your politics … Clinton is doing a great thing in organizing the Clinton Global Initiative and connecting governments, businesses, nonprofits and others to change the world by making specific commitments of money, time and action.

There's a live feed online -- last year 50,000 people tuned in. So far, 450,000 have watched.

Back to the press conference. A woman asked Clinton his thoughts on the health of women and girls around the world. Here's his response (what I got of it writing as fast as I could):

"150,000 years ago the first homosapiens lived in Africa. They spent about 90,000 years wandering around Africa, and then they started finding their way to other continents. About 30,000 years ago, they inhabited all the continents and about 8,000 years ago we saw the first civilizations.

"So, we went from zero to 6.5 billion people in about 150,000 years.

"In 46 years, we'll have 9 billion people.

"The way to deal with this growth is to educate girls and help them make a living because we know then that girls will delay marriage, delay childbearing, will have fewer kids, and will create stronger families.

"Rich countries are struggling to keep up with population replacement levels. Developing countries can't support the populations they have now.

"We need to see women's empowerment in the context of other crises in the world. The education and expansion of economic opportunities for women will slow population growth, will encourage men to stay where they are born, reducing terrorism and immigration issues, and will reduce climate change.

"We just need to look at what happens in places where there's equal access to education. I think the immigration debate might flip because developed countries won't have enough people to fund their economies and people won't be leaving their countries of birth to find opportunities elsewhere."

So, according to the former President, the health of the globe depends on educating and empowering girls.

Comments

[Brandie]

Thank you for the link to watch it on-line =)

[ann adams]

Nobody ever accused Bill of being stupid (except once or twice).

He made some good points.