When you save the life of anyone, a farmer, a teacher, a mother, they are contributing productively into the economy.
Interpretation
Saving a life contributes to the overall productivity of society.
This quote emphasizes the significant impact that saving lives has on society and the economy. By highlighting roles such as farmers, teachers, and mothers, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala underscores that every individual plays a crucial part in the economic fabric, and preserving lives ensures that those contributions continue.
In practice
In a speech about community service, you could reference this quote to emphasize the importance of helping others.
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.
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.
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.
One of the most powerful insights in economics is this idea of a division of labor. You do the thing you're good at. Other people do something else that they're good at. The net effect is better for everybody.
There is no easy fix or youth unemployment. Partnership between the public and private sectors can make a big difference.
We need to revise our economic thinking to give full value to our natural resources. This revised economics will stabilize both the theory and the practice of free-market capitalism. It will provide business and public policy with a powerful new tool for economic development, profitability, and the promotion of the public good.
Wall Street has turned the economy into a giant asset-stripping scheme, one whose purpose is to suck the last bits of meat from the carcass of the middle class.
No nation was ever ruined by trade.
The first requisite of a sound monetary system is that it put the least possible power over the quantity or quality of money in the hands of the politicians.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.