The best way to help Africans today is to help them to stand on their own feet. And the best way to do that is by helping create jobs.
Interpretation
Empowering Africans through job creation fosters self-reliance and progress.
In this quote, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala emphasizes the importance of empowering individuals and communities in Africa by facilitating job creation. She advocates for a sustainable approach to aid that enables people to become self-sufficient, rather than relying on external assistance, highlighting the dignity and capability of Africans to build their futures.
In practice
In a speech about economic development, one might say, 'As Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala wisely noted, the best way to help Africans today is to help them stand on their own feet through job creation.'
When I became finance minister, they called me Okonjo-Wahala - or 'Trouble Woman.' It means 'I give you hell.' But I don't care what names they call me. I'm a fighter; I'm very focused on what I'm doing, and relentless in what I want to achieve, almost to a fault. If you get in my way, you get kicked.
I'm trying to tell you that there's a new wave on the continent. A new wave of openness and democratization in which, since 2000, more than two-thirds of African countries have had multi-party democratic elections. Not all of them have been perfect, or will be, but the trend is very clear.
When you save the life of anyone, a farmer, a teacher, a mother, they are contributing productively into the economy.
Investing in women is smart economics, and investing in girls, catching them upstream, is even smarter economics.
I felt Nigeria didn't have to succumb to the image of being a corrupt country; we didn't have to let the economy stagnate.
I know what it means to go to the stream to fetch water... what it means when people are poor and don't have enough to eat. It's not enough to say you know about poverty. You have to live it.
Well, I think by any expectation South Africa has come a tremendously long way. We've seen a society that many people thought couldn't withstand a peaceful transition to democracy without a great deal of violence, in fact, make that transition and do it in relative peace and security.
We're heading towards a perception tipping point where it's going to soon become a foregone conclusion that not only has Newark turned a corner, but it's way down the right road.
Flow in the living moment. β We are always in a process of becoming and nothing is fixed. Have no rigid system in you, and youβll be flexible to change with the ever changing. Open yourself and flow, my friend. Flow in the total openness of the living moment. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Moving, be like water. Still, be like a mirror. Respond like an echo.
We're in a freefall into future. We don't know where we're going. Things are changing so fast, and always when you're going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It's a very interesting shift of perspective and that's all it is... joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes.
I think the deepest level of our freedom is being able to change our identity.
All is change; all yields its place and goes.
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