 Thank you Dan and thank you all for being here today and thanks for inviting me to share part of the morning with you. I'm here because I want to be here. I think you're here probably because you want to be here. You want to talk about development, you want to talk about foreign assistance. I happen to believe as a member of Congress that the small investment we make in foreign assistance is a good investment. When you talk about being where you want to be, as a member of Congress I can tell you that a lot of members of Congress want to be on the Appropriations Committee. They want to be on that committee because that's the committee that spends the money. That's the committee that decides how much money you're going to spend and where you're going to spend it. Now I sit on one of the subcommittees, actually three of them, one's called Defense and that's where more than half of all the money that we spend goes. And that's important. It's an important responsibility. I chair a subcommittee called Financial Services and General Government. And so I'm in charge of overseeing and funding about 20 different agencies, starting with the Supreme Court of the United States and the IRS, which brings groans usually when I mention that. And then I sit on state and foreign operations. As Dan said, that's the subcommittee that spends money on foreign assistance. And when you talk about being somewhere you want to be, most members of Congress would like to be on the Appropriations Committee, but they're not necessarily anxious to be on the subcommittee that spends billions of dollars all across the world when that doesn't always play well back home. You probably know that a poll last year indicated that more than half the American people think that we spend about 25% of all the money that the government spends. About 25% goes for foreign assistance and development. And you'll hear people say from time to time, good grief, if we just didn't send all that money to all those countries around the world, we could balance our own budget. We got a lot of problems right here at home. And so a lot of people aren't too anxious to be on that. In fact, that's a subcommittee bill that rarely makes it to the House floor. Senator Daschle knows because it's hard to pass legislation that says we're going to spend money in countries that some people can't even pronounce their names or find them on a map, but we're going to spend that money. But I think that's a good investment. And I'm proud of the work that we've done. And as a member of that subcommittee I travel all around the world and from time to time when people come before our subcommittee, I like to ask them the question. Mr. Bono was before our subcommittee. Mr. Bono or Bono, I said, Mr. Bono, can I call you Bono? And he said, yeah, you can call me Bono. I said, let me ask you a question. Help me understand how I'm going to go home to talk to my 600,000 constituents in Northeast Florida and explain to them why we're going to spend $15 billion in Africa on AIDS when we got a lot of problems in our own communities. And he said, you know, that's a good question because he thought about that. He's very passionate, as you may know. And I think his answer, I don't recall exactly, but it was along the lines of it's almost like a moral responsibility. It's the right thing to do. It's out of a sense of compassion that we're the richest country on the face of the earth and we have an obligation to help people that are less fortunate than we are. And I think that's part of probably why a lot of you are in the room today because you know and understand that it's important, it's important to be compassionate and whether it comes out of religious conviction or whether it just comes out of it's the right thing to do. Well, a little later on that year, Bill Gates came before our subcommittee and asked him the same kind of a similar question. And I said, Mr. Gates, you spend a lot of your own money helping underdeveloped countries around the world trying to deal with disease and hunger. And I know that you go out and you talk to your friends and you ask them to invest like you are. And I said, what do you tell them? What's your sales pitch? How do you convince people they ought to be given money like you are? And his answer was maybe a little more practical because he said, you know, I try to tell people that if we invest in development and assistance in emerging countries around the world that when they get better, the world gets better. When the world gets better, we get better. And he said, it's like if there's a peaceful and stable country being developed, then we might spend less money on our military. The general would tell you that. We just talked about that. There's a defense component to foreign assistance and development. And of course, he's a businessman. He said, you know, if we help develop these emerging countries and they're less dependent, they can become more independent. They grow an economy. They have a productive workforce. He said, that's good for the world economy. It creates new markets for our goods and also creates new places to produce the goods that we produce. And so you can see that there's not only this moral component but a defense component and an economic component. We talked about diplomacy, how important that is. And so you all come from different backgrounds, but you care about the same thing and maybe from a different perspective, a different background. We're all working together to make the world a better place. And I've seen a lot of the suffering around the world and you have too. I'm sure that maybe what motivates you to do with the things that you're doing because you want to change things for the better. I've seen that but I've also seen a lot of the successes, the achievements that we've made, the investment that we make as the United States of America into these emerging countries. And the film laid out the facts. You know, I have a daughter that's 35 years old. And 35 years old, 35 years ago when she was born, literally half the world, half the world lived in extreme poverty, 50%, a buck and a quarter a day, half the world, 35 years ago. As it pointed out today, it's maybe 15% of the world lives in extreme poverty. And that's progress. 35 years ago when my daughter was born, every day, every day 40,000 people died in this world because of the poor living conditions, 40,000 people. 35 years later when she now has children, 17,000 people die every day because of poor living conditions. Now, that's an improvement, obviously. But think about it, that's good news in the sense that there are 8 million people that didn't die last year that would have died 35 years ago. But still, we've got such a long way to go. You look around the world and HIV aid, 7.7 million people today are being treated because of PETFAR. You look at malaria. It was mentioned, I chair the malaria, what we call a caucus in the house. And my job is to help educate my colleagues about what we're doing in the world of malaria. And the general will tell you that not only is malaria curable and preventable, but it's also the number one infectious disease that our military has to deal with. And they can tell you that over the last 100 years, more people in the military have died from malaria than have been killed in the battlefield. But we're making progress there, and they can show you that in the last 10 years, and it's particularly tragic for young people, five years in age and younger, in the last 10 years, the death rate for five-year-olds by malaria has been reduced by 50% worldwide. And it's 60% reduction in Africa. And a lot of times, all that is, is supplying people with a bed net, a mosquito net. And this year, they will distribute the 1 billionth, that's B isn't billion, 1 billion mosquito nets will have been distributed in the last decade to help save 4 million lives from malaria. And so we're making progress. We're doing good things. We're achieving. But I think this conference, as that film pointed out so well, the world is changing, and it's changing rapidly. And we have to change with it. The small investment that the United States makes in development and foreign assistance, the work that you supply from the private sector and the NGO, you've got to be changing, too. You've got to recognize that we have to evaluate, and we have to reevaluate the work that's being done. We've got to innovate. We've got to be creative. We've got to recognize that all of this is interdependent. For too long, we'd say, let's deal with hunger here, and let's deal with poverty here, and maybe over here we'll deal with education. But it's all working together. And if we can develop a safe citizenry, and yet there's no place for them to go to work or go to school or train, what have we done? And if we can build schools and ports and buildings, and yet we've got diseased citizens that can't get up and go to work, how's that helping? Somehow we've got to coordinate. We've got to be more flexible. And let me give you a couple of thoughts that I'm sure you'll be talking about today. I think, number one, there's a pretty good model in what they call the Millennium Challenge Corporation. About 10 years ago, under President Bush, that was created, this year we'll spend about a billion dollars that that Millennium Corporation will be able to spend. They enter into contracts with different countries, and you bring about a sense of country ownership. You don't just write another check, and another check, and another check, but you sit down with a country that's developing and say, what do you need, how can we help? And by the way, here's a way that you can help yourself. There are 20 criteria that we have that have to do with rule of law, and women's rights, and education, and anti-corruption. And it's a contract, and they enter into that. And that brings about accountability. It brings about transparency. It brings about the ability to not only, as they say, give a man a fish, but to help the man become a fisherman. And they take ownership and they grow. And that's a model that we ought to think about. When I talk about coordination, one of the things that the President's malaria initiative has done over the last 10 years is try to bring together the Department of Defense where they're working on a vaccine, where the CDC is working on a vaccine, where you've got the Peace Corps when you're trying to distribute mosquito nets. Bringing about coordination. Petfar does great. They train people, but it's age-related. And we ought to think about how we can broaden that because we've got to deal with not just AIDS, not just malaria, but tuberculosis and all the things that you know about. And the private sector is very much involved in there. I was just in Columbia, where Coca-Cola, in each of the countries they sell coax, they got to have a clean water supply. And so that kind of works pretty well with USAID to say not only we got some fresh water to put in the Coke, but here's some for the folks to drink. My wife was in Bolivia not long ago, up in the mountains of the Andes, outside of Ketchabamba in a little place called Arama Sea where if you didn't die by the time you were two, you had the good fortune of living to maybe be 35 or 36. If you didn't die from dysentery, then you could wait and die when a chugabug fell out of the thatch roof and bit your chest and you died from heart disease. And I ask my friends, how long do you usually stay when you go up there? And they say, well, we stay until the fresh water runs out and then we come back. And still we get sick from time to time. So we can do a better job of coordination. We've talked a lot about public-private partnerships. More and more, there's going to be private dollars put in because we're not going to have a whole lot more federal dollars. This year we'll spend about $25 million. And remember I said, people think it's 25% of the spending. Think about it, do the math. It's not even 1%. It's 6 tenths of 1%. That's how much money that we spend as a federal government developing and assisting countries around the world. And that's not going to grow a whole lot. So it demands that we're more creative. And they were more accountable. They were more transparent. USAID, Raj Shah, you remember, spent five years here and did a great job of bringing about a sense of accountability, not just spending money, not just measuring how much we put in, but measuring what kind of results did we get. And there are better ways to do that. And finally, it might be a good idea to broaden our horizon. We talked some about trade. And there's a trade component to foreign assistance. And one of the things that people don't talk about much is the violence that goes on in the world today, particularly among the poor. When I said that 15% of the people are now living in extreme poverty, and that's been reduced from 50% to 15%. But if you go back and look 35 years ago, about 2 billion people were living on $2 a day. They're doing better. They're not extremely poor, but they're poor. And not much has changed for them because of the violence that goes on that you don't read about and I don't read about. Maybe every now and then we read about human trafficking or sex slaves. But we don't see the violence that takes place with women, with the barrows, with the slums, where people are living and they'll never get out of that. And we're not really focusing on that. But if we could do a better job of dealing with that, if you build a school, and there are places where, I've talked to young women, they're not gonna go to school because they can't afford to leave their little hut to go walk through the crowd to get to the school because they're probably gonna get raped on the way and they're just not gonna take that chance. And so what good is a school if you can't get up and go to school? But maybe that's something that we could throw in that mix that we don't always talk about. How do you deal with that? And is it broads into the world of terrorism that our military deals with all across the world? So there are things we can do. There are things that we can do better and that's why you're here and I wish you well. I just wanna say, in closing, that number one, I think the small investment that we make as a nation arguably is one of the best investments we make in terms of what we get for the money we spend. But I would say we continue to need to evaluate and reevaluate and innovate. And when we bring everything together with its education and its relieving poverty and disease, when we do all those things and train people and educate them, what do we do? We unleash this tremendous human spirit and then kids can go to school. Moms and dads can go to work. Communities can flourish, businesses can grow and we, the United States of America, can be part of building relationships with these developing nations around the world. So I look forward to continue that work. I thank you for the work that you do and thank you for having me here today. Thank you so much.