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.
We should live and labor in our time that what came to us as a seed may go to the next generation as blossom, and what came to us as blossom, may go to them as fruit. This is what we mean by progress.
Passion is the bridge that takes you from pain to change.
I have to say goodbye to things in order to take on bigger things that I've always wanted to do.
The status quo is persistent and resistant. It exists because everyone wants it to. Everyone believes that what they've got is probably better than the risk and fear that come with change.
The goal in the end is not to win elections. The goal is to change society.
A careless way of sauntering across the earth and breaking open its treasures, a terrible dependency on sucking out the world's best juices for ourselves-these may also be our enemies. The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.
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