 Good morning. Last week, I was in New York City, where leaders from around the world, 193 of them, came together at the UN General Assembly to adopt a new, ambitious vision for the world's future, the sustainable development goals. Actually, do I have a clicker on my slides? I don't see a first slide. Sorry about that. So these 193 leaders came together to adopt the sustainable development goals. Sorry. And for the first time in the world's history, I believe we are within reach of the overarching goal, which is to end extreme poverty by 2030. Social entrepreneurs are vital to achieving this goal of ending extreme poverty. They drive economic growth by using market-based approaches to address issues around poverty. But as important as entrepreneurs have been in driving growth and innovation in the United States, they're even more essential in developing countries, where there's almost a billion youth who are either unemployed or underemployed. In low-income countries, small and medium enterprises contribute 78% of full-time employment, as compared to 66% in high-income countries. And every dollar invested in a small and growing business, on average, generates more than $13 in the local economy through the benefits to suppliers, customers, and employees. Of course, in addition to generating economic growth, social enterprises generate social impact by providing poor customers with access to essential goods and services that are normally out of their reach, whether it's clean water, energy, health care, education, or financial services. The US Global Development Lab is a newest bureau at USAID, which is the US Government's International Development Agency. We launched the Global Development Lab a year ago, April, to use science, technology, innovation, and partnerships to transform international development by identifying faster, better, cheaper, and more sustainable solutions. We do so by casting as wide a net as possible to find the best ideas for innovations, tools, and approaches that are disruptive. And then we use hard data and fast iteration to develop the most promising ones. And finally, we work across USAID and our partners to mainstream proven solutions. The lab is proud to be a part of President Obama's Spark Initiative to bring $1 billion of new investment to the next generation of entrepreneurs around the world. USAID itself has invested over $900 million to benefit social entrepreneurs in developing countries. And there's three areas that the lab works in that I'll talk about. First of all, the lab invests directly in entrepreneurs themselves. We believe that donor support is essential to being catalytic to help these early-stage entrepreneurs get off the ground, refine their models, and get to the point where they can attract commercial investment. For example, through our Development Innovation Ventures program, or DIV, we provided an initial $100,000 seed grant to Off-Grid Electric in Tanzania. This enabled them to supply their first 1,000 customers with clean, affordable, and accessible solar energy. Based on their success, we followed on with a $1 million grant. These grant enabled the entrepreneurs to refine their business models, prove their capabilities and social impact, and gain customer traction. Based on that, Off-Grid was able to leverage this lab's initial investment to raise $16 million in private equity and an additional $7 million from IFC. And I'm pleased to report that as of July, more than 50,000 households in Tanzania now have access to electricity because of Off-Grid Electric. The second area that the lab works in is that we partner with investors, accelerators, and intermediaries that support the broader entrepreneurial ecosystems. It's clear that funding alone is not the only challenge for small and growing businesses. They often lack talent management and business development capabilities that are needed to grow. So our partnering to Accelerate Entrepreneurship Initiative, or PACE, works with intermediaries to address these challenges faced by small and growing businesses by providing access to acceleration services and blended financing. As of June, the 35 direct investments we've made in PACE have generated 7,000 new jobs, earned $15 million in new revenues, and raised $30 million in additional capital. Finally, the third area that we work in is to generate additional research in understanding entrepreneurial ecosystems to understand which interventions are actually effective to helping entrepreneurs succeed. For example, there's been this rapid growth of accelerators, incubators, and tech hubs across developing countries, as you see here on the map. But do they work? Do they actually help entrepreneurs succeed? I'm not sure. Some do and probably some don't. We hope to answer these questions through the Global Accelerator Learning Initiative, or GALI, where we're partnering with the Aspen Network for Development Entrepreneurs and Emory University, funded through the Lab, Amidiar Network, Lemelson Foundation, and Ergidius Foundation. GALI is going to collect more data on more than 10,000 global firms to study questions such as whether accelerators actually do accelerate growth of early stage ventures, and which accelerators have the biggest impact on entrepreneurial success. By identifying the factors that most contribute to success, we hope to be able to better target our future investments. So we're really proud of the work we've done, and yet we realize that there are so many more challenges ahead. One of those challenges I want to talk about is that, as all of you here know today, more and more of the best solutions are hybrid ones, which are not either pure nonprofits nor are they pure for-profits, and thus they usually need to draw from a complicated mix of grant funding, impact funding, and private sector funding. The problem with this is that the vast majority of available funding is either pure philanthropic funding or pure commercial funding. So of the estimated funding that is aligned with the new global goals, commercial funding is about 10 times as much as the size of philanthropic funding, which in turn is about 10 times the size of impact funds. And of that tiny slice of impact funds, we believe that only about 18% of it is truly concessionary. This means that an infinitesimal portion of the available funding even attempts to address the hybrid funding needs of social enterprises. I believe that truly concessionary impact funds will always be a challenge, just from my personal experience. I give to charities on one hand, and on the other hand, I invest from my retirement. And I have to admit, I get a little queasy when I think about taking my retirement money and putting it up as first lost capital for a social enterprise. I may be a heretic here for saying this, but I'm just not convinced that truly concessionary impact funding that is needed will grow fast enough to meet the growing needs. Today, when we have a social enterprise that earns revenues, but not sufficient revenues to meet the expectation of private sector returns, we mostly bridge this gap through one-off solutions, putting together custom funding stacks that mix grant funding, impact investment, and commercial funds. It takes a lot of work, and it takes a lot of time. How many of you guys have seen that happen? So, is there another way? What if we were able to create a market by actually paying for social outcomes? Where the social value of a business is externalized, whether it be $20 or $2? Think about this similar to the way carbon credits externalize the environmental costs to the business. Instead, the social value becomes simply another reliable revenue stream to the social entrepreneur, and the social enterprise can then operate like a normal private sector business and draw funding from normal private sector debt and capital sources. So for donors, what this would mean is creating a stable market by paying for social value rather than deploying traditional programs. The advantage, we only pay if the results we're looking for are achieved. For social entrepreneurs, what this would mean is tapping into the far more significant commercial funding sources based on their ability to compete in this hybrid market. And for private investors, this would enable them to invest in the full range of social enterprises that are out there and be able to draw market rate returns. So this isn't a new idea. Social impact bonds and development impact bonds have started to explore this space, but it's still incredibly rare. This is just one approach, but I believe we need to accelerate our progress by one, effectively measuring social impact so it can be securitized in ways like this and two, standardizing hybrid financial instruments that make it much easier and much more flexible to access. We don't purport to have all the solutions and what we wanna do is we're here because we wanna work with all of you to find better, more effective ways to support social entrepreneurs. We believe really play an essential role in meeting global goals. I'm really encouraged by the increased collaboration we're seeing between investors, entrepreneurs, and development sector actors, such as ourselves at USAID. And I'm grateful for Kevin Jones and SoCAP team for bringing us all here together again today. We really look forward to continuing the important collaboration with all of you. Thank you so much.