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.
For decades, we resisted violence - until Sharpeville.
And it is clear that in the colonial countries the peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant, outside the class system is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms; colonization and decolonization a simply a question of relative strength.
Challenges are gifts that force us to search for a new center of gravity. Don't fight them. Just find a new way to stand.
If there had been no troublemakers, no Dissenters, we should still be living in caves.
The writer catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.
There is no power in the world like that of women ... this most potent constituency we seek to represent, and for their suffrages we sue.
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