If you don't have an effective teacher in front of the classroom, you won't change the trajectory for students.
Sometimes it's the people you can't help who inspire you the most.
I care much more about saving the lives of mothers and babies than I do about a fancy museum somewhere.
Human-centered design. Meeting people where they are and really taking their needs and feedback into account. When you let people participate in the design process, you find that they often have ingenious ideas about what would really help them. And it’s not a onetime thing; it’s an iterative process.
I learn in a different way. I learn experientially.
If you don't invest in the woman, empower her, give her the things she needs to lift her family up, you're just not going to make the progress that you want to make. But if you put her at the centre, you can change a lot for that family, and it has ripple effects through the economy.
I went to business school, and I went straight from that to a nine-year career at Microsoft. Eventually, I ran a big chunk of the consumer products division for Microsoft.Then I left with the birth of our first daughter because Bill and I both wanted to have a few kids.
That's universal - we all want to bring every good thing to our children. But what's not universal is our ability to provide every good thing.
One life is worth no more or less than any other
What great changes have not been ambitious?
Helping people doesn't have to be an unsound financial strategy.
It's important to remember that behind every data point is a daughter, a mother, a sister—a person with hopes and dreams.
But iPods and iPhones are two things we don't get for our kids.
When I look at 225 million women who want contraceptives, and then I look at the 52 million unintended pregnancies that could be avoided by addressing this unmet need, where can we have the biggest impact with our voice, our dollars, our partners? It's on contraceptives. I would rather address the problem upstream.
Bill and I both firmly believe that even the most difficult global health problems can be solved.
If you invest in a girl or a woman, you are investing in everybody else.
If you want to lift up an economy in Africa, you basically start with the women.
You can't save kids just with vaccines.
Men make different investments than women do. Women tend to invest more of their earnings than men do in their family's well-being - as much as 10 times more.
I think it's very important that we instill in our kids that it has nothing to do with their name or their situation that they're growing up in; it has to do with who they are as an individual.
Like in Africa, if somebody doesn't have fuel, they're still going and collecting firewood. If they get an oven, that's a huge difference. You can do things to reduce the inequities by making sure that they can get clean energy, safe energy. To make sure they're not having to collect water every day. That's huge for women in the developing world.
Any social or cultural change has to be made openly and with people agreeing. You don't get there by just pushing an outsider's point of view.
Now we just really need to do the work, which we're doing, to get contraceptives out to women worldwide.
Vaccines are a miracle cure. Eight out of 10 children are getting vaccines.
You can have the best vaccines for a woman or her child, but if you can't get her to come and get them then they won't work.
