 Hello, I'm Mike Oreskes and welcome to this Associated Press Davos debate. Can extreme poverty be eradicated in the world in the next 15 years? A United Nations panel says it can be done, lifting the lives of a billion people. But the proposal suggests a massive reordering of business, politics and lifestyles on everything from gender equity to carbon consumption. Is this truly possible? We will ask two of the authors of that UN report and three other distinguished panelists. Let me introduce them. They are the CEO of Save the Children International, Jasmine Whitbread. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, David Cameron, who is also Co-Chair of that UN panel. The lead singer of U2 and a long time activist, Bono. The Finance Minister of Nigeria, who was a member of the UN panel, Ngozi Okonjo-Iwala. And the Chief Executive of the British Insurer Prudential, Tijum Teum. Thank you all for being with us. Let's get right into the very big topic in front of us. 14 years ago, the world rallied around an idea called the Millennium Development Goals. These were specific targets for reducing poverty, hunger and disease by 2015. Now many people have been lifted out of poverty. But a billion people or more still live on less than $1.25 a day. So let me ask each of our panelists, starting with Jasmine Whitbread, who are these extremely poor people, and what do they need the world to do now for them to lift them out of poverty? So first of all, these people are just like you and I. They're mums and dads, kids. They want the best things for their children in life. They want an education. They want decent health care. And where their living has changed, actually, in those 15 years. It's interesting. Back in 1990, the majority, 93 percent, lived in the least developed countries, the low-income countries. Now, two-thirds of them actually live in middle-income countries. Prime Minister. Well, I think that the vision that we set out on the high-level panel, I think it is achievable. We shouldn't have in our world a billion people living on less than $1.25 a day. And I think the absolute key here is to recognise the Millennium Development Goals were brilliant. They inspired a generation. They were clear. They were measurable. They got politicians, countries, NGOs, people inspired. And we need something like that when they do their time. And that's what the high-level panel was about. Let's have an inspiring goal, which is the aim to eradicate extreme poverty. Let's make sure these goals are specific and measurable and clear. And also, and I think absolutely vital, and I say this as Prime Minister of a country that's fulfilled its aid obligations, this isn't just about money. It's about good governance. It's about the rule of law. It's about tackling corruption. It's about giving people access to justice. It's about property rights. It's about the rights of women. If we do those things, because those are so many of the things that keep people and countries trapped in poverty, we can achieve the goal. But it's got to be specific. It's got to be inspiring. And it's got to be about governance and corruption, as well as money. Where are they? Well, they're not here. We know that. And we also have to be a bit careful, and I have to be very careful. About speaking for them. And I think these new goals that we speak of will be way more successful. The more the poorer consulted, because the people these goals seek to serve are often left out of the process. And this is a practical thing, as well as a sort of people-pleasing thing, because when they're signed, that moment, if it's big enough and the goals are good enough and famous enough, that will inspire a movement to make sure that they are carried through. And that movement will largely be south of the equator, not north of the equator. And that's what I'm excited about. Kind of getting out of the way of the poor will be a theme for me in this discussion. Can you give us a word? Well, I just want to say that I agree with Bono, but to give him some comfort that in this panel, the one thing we did, which was not done the first time, was that we did extensive consultations, and we did it in countries with civil society organizations. We reached out to the young who had very strong views on what should be done. For example, their biggest thing was that whatever happens, if we're going to eradicate poverty, there must be total accountability by those working on this from governments to private sector and so on. And so this is crucial, that we're not arrogated to ourselves, the views of those who are not around the table, but that we reach out. So we did do that, and that was one of the parts of the work that we actually enjoyed the most. Now, to me, what do these people want? What do the poor people in the country want? They certainly, from our perspective, they don't want handouts. They don't want you to cater from them. They just want to work. They just want a livelihood. They just want to be empowered, to be able to take care of themselves. And for me, the post-MDG must revolve around this issue of creating jobs, decent jobs, jobs that will make people give people a livelihood and give them dignity as human beings, jobs that will empower women and enable them to take care of their children and their families. That's what it's about. Now we need to interrogate ourselves. This isn't going to come easily. We have to think about how we are going to pay for it. Tijantiam. Michael, a lot has been said already, and I... A billion is a strange number. It's a billion human beings. It's a billion faces. And if I wanted to use the formula and say, there are the faces of our shame, we can solve this. We've got the technology, we've got the means, we've got the skills. We can do this. So it's about how, not whether. Because I think everybody here will agree that we must do this. Many of us come from Africa. Certainly my grandfather was one of them. He was a wonderful man. What they want is to, as Ngoti said, is to have opportunity, respect. They want to be respected as human beings. And I think we can do this. So we'll come back in a little while to really some detail about how. But before we do that, Prime Minister, I want to come back to you about the high-level panel. I hear a lot of ideas here, and it seems to me that if you want an inspiring message, there needs to be some focus. And your panel report was a breathtaking document, because it seemed to address almost every problem the world is facing right now. Climate change, gender equity, income inequality, governance, corruption, it was all in there. Can everything actually all be in there, or do we need to leave some things out so we can get the work done? We do need to prioritize, but I would argue, if you want to help the bottom billion, then you can't leave out things like climate change. You can't leave out gender equality. And crucially, what we put in for the first time, which I think is so exciting, is we put in a whole set of goals on governance, on justice, on democracy, on rights. And the truth is, that is what keeps a lot of people trapped in poverty. I mean, why is North Korea poor and South Korea rich? It's not the weather. It's not the part of the world they're living in. It's to do with the institutions under which they live, and the governments that they have running those countries. So I think I would say we did prioritize. We said eradicate extreme poverty. That's the inspiring goal we're saying the world should aim for. And we did something new and exciting, which is to say, governance, corruption, justice, democracy, these things are vitally important in helping countries to go from poverty to wealth. So I think we did prioritize. If we can get the goals from 12 to 10 to eight, no one would be happier than me. My worry is the opposite. My worry is that this, we could end up with nothing if we keep on discussing it, or we could end up with a weak replacement to the Millennium Development Goals. Or possibly worst of all, we could end up with a sort of Christmas tree that everyone hangs everything on, and it isn't very clear. So I hope that we can, from this meeting and other meetings, get a real campaign, north and south of the equator, a real campaign to get governments, countries, prime ministers, and the United Nations to take on as much of what I think is a very clear report as possible. So I've got to come to Jasmine Wood, Brad, but before I do, Madam Finance Minister, you are also a member of this panel, and the Prime Minister just said it would be good to focus on having fewer more focused goals. The Secretary General actually went the other way and added three more goals in his work. How do we get to the focus here? First of all, let me say something about the goals we came out with, which are very important to me as a person and to a lot of us in the developing world. They are universal. Gender rights are not about just people at the bottom end of the scale. You know, corruption and governance, you may have more problems in countries of the south, but there are also problems in the north. Accountabilities for everyone, because even when there's corruption, there's a north end of it and a south end of it. So I just want to make that point that what was attractive to all of us in the panel is the universality of these goals. The second thing as to the number of goals is what we're seeing in this panel we're just on with the Secretary General. We need to stop seeing some of these things as separate. You know, it's not environmental versus development. You know, they are integrated. The way we feel them on the ground as a policymaker who has to deal with this issue on the ground, when we have a climate event, as we did in Nigeria and Benin, two years in 2012, we hadn't had one in 35 years like that. A million families were affected. All the livelihoods, the agricultural livelihoods were wiped out, the health investments were wiped out. This wasn't much publicized because we dealt with it. So what I'm saying is that climate change event resulted in something that was so damaging to development. So if we can see some of these goals as integrated, we might not have as many. And I agree with the Prime Minister, you know, this issue of focus, we fought really hard on it. You know, we could have had 20 goals, actually we had as many. And it was, you know, very hard. And everybody in the panel was so combative and so passionate, but we managed to get it down to, I think it's 12 now. Yeah, thank you. So far. Well, just first of all, I think it's important to really build on what's been achieved with the first set of goals and what we hope will be achieved by the end of 2015. It's the last 700 days. And I think with a really redoubled push, we could meet about half of those goals. So there have been, some of them have been met. You know, the goal to reduce by a half the number of people living in extreme poverty. Others, you know, great progress has been made, but we need a big push. For example, you know, it's half the number of children who are dying before their fifth birthday from preventable causes. You know, it's dropped by half the number of children who are out of school and getting a basic primary school who should be in school. So there's been huge progress made on those fairly focused set of goals for the first 15 years and we need a push for the next 700 days. I think it's really important that we build on that and that the next goals actually to pick up on, I completely agree on the point about universality because these goals, what we talk about is zero goals rather than sort of relative, rather than reducing by two-thirds the number of children who die before, rather than three-quarters the number of women who die in childbirth from preventable causes. That should apply everywhere. It should apply in every country. It should apply for all of those children and mothers who are currently being left behind because it's always easier to do the first half. The second half is going to be harder and that's what we're facing, but with a redoubled effort, we can absolutely do this. Mr. Gentil. Just a word maybe for a private sector here because a lot of people talk about the demographic dividend in Africa and you really need to think seriously and hard about the demographic. Working-age population in Africa by 2040 will be 1.1 billion. That is more than China and more than India to put things in perspective. So a demographic dividend will either be a dividend or a curse depending on whether we can create jobs in sufficient quantity in that period. We will only get the kind of development we're talking about if we're able to create tens of millions of jobs every year and that is not going to happen by itself and only the private sector is in opposition to do that. There's a big difference between the money from the private sector and Prime Minister with respect to the money from the public sector. We have $800 billion of assets, financial. This is money that we've been entrusted with willingly by people who have given it to us to manage. The money from the government comes from people's pocket. It has to take it from their pocket. So it's of a very different nature in my mind from what we have and our resources are more mobile, they're easier to invest. We have much more freedom in doing things than you have Prime Minister because you have to go for parliament, you have to go for all that process that we all know. So the answer is in the private sector, that's where our resources are. So the discussion has to be how do we channel those resources? There's more than enough money, even in Africa. I mean, do you realize there is an excess of savings in Africa? Africa doesn't need capital flows from the outside. There is enough savings in Africa to fund what needs to be done. What's not happening is the intermediation, turning those savings into productive investment in the economy to create jobs. Well, let me pursue that with you a little bit. So you said you had $800 billion. How much of that do you have available for investment in Africa? I understand you actually recently bought a company in Africa, in Ghana, the first actual direct purchase. Yes, when we buy, we like to buy cheap. So it wasn't Christmas. We don't spend that much money. By the way, you can't think that we could have 10% of our assets. $800 billion? 10% of our assets ultimately invested in Africa. $80 billion. Yeah, if what we're missing is the pipeline of project of bankable investment opportunities, we want to invest. So Madam Finance Minister. We can give you bankable investment. Davos is a place for making deals. Here you are. Tell him how you're going to make Nigeria the place for his investments. No, they're there. So Tijan, he just had to persuade his board. I hope I'm not talking out of context. You know, they're just waking up to the fact now that if they're not in Nigeria, they're not in Africa. So they are coming. You know, this is the largest country. We do have, seriously, rate of return on investments in our country has been rated by UNCTAD and others as the fourth best at over 30%. We have a population of 170 million people. We're lower middle income country. I think the opportunities are coming. However, that's not what excites us. We are here to talk about post MDGs. We have to admit that our growth has come with a lot of inequality, that we are not creating enough jobs, that it's not just good enough to grow. We have to focus on the quality of that growth. And if these investments can come to help us finance the investments in agriculture, to help us in housing, these are areas where you can make a material difference in creating jobs for poor people, as well as creating a social safety net. That's what will excite us. And we have to really work with him on that. Prime Minister? Well, I just pick up on two points. First of all, I think that the report that Ngozi and I worked on is a very pro-private sector, very pro-enterprise, pro-business report, because we recognize that it's, I would say, it's the two things people want most of all is a job and a voice. And we're very focused on the job side and those jobs are coming from private sector development. On the, what Ngozi says about the universality, I think is really important. This is not a set of goals being sort of handed down from rich countries to poor countries or poor people. These are universal goals. And to take up the point about corruption, you know, we'll never tackle corruption in poor countries unless we're more transparent in rich countries. And that's what the G8 worked that we were doing over the last year about registers of beneficial ownership, about transparency, about tax transparency. That is an absolutely vital part of this development agenda. And that, you know, if anything, applies more to better off countries than to less well off ones. And that's where the rubber hits the road in Davos. Because, you know, we all understand that there's a sort of avalanche of cynicism about us just by being here. And, you know, capitalism is in the dark. Davos is, you know, there's a jury that, you know, the jury is going to decide on us based on how we deal with these issues, not in the abstract, but in the concrete. And it's, you know, it's interesting that the Prime Minister has been banging on about this and he's absolutely right. Is that the business community north of the equator has to be reformed. And we have just an issue that's running right now. I think it's this week. It went to the European Parliament. There's an anti-money laundering directive, which is live and the Prime Minister's been leading on. It was really good. The beneficial ownership of companies is a really hot topic because the evil twins, you know, which is, you know, opacity in the extractive industries, for example, and these companies where they hide their assets. This is something that this community can really look at and really solve. I think you need aid, of course. The Prime Minister's stood by his commitments. I think it is a remarkable thing that the people of Great Britain, going through the worst recession since the war, have actually stood by their aid commitments. I think it's a blessing to them on them. I think it'll do well for their economy, but it showed real commitment. But he and the Great Britain knows that, you know, the real, these are the real stars of the show and business is going to, you know, commerce is going to be the thing that takes most people out of extreme poverty. Just got to make commerce better, make it more open, more transparent. That's what I would say. Vanna, can I just follow up on one point here? Extractive industries, we're in Davos. There's a lot of talk here about the commitment of industry to development. Has the oil and gas and other mining industries embraced your proposals for more transparency? Oh, yeah, some of the criminals around here are not wearing ski masks, they're on skis. And it is deeply disturbing that a, just a simple piece of legislation which was approved, led by this Prime Minister, but also the Germans were there and the French were there, which was to make it legal if you're registered on a European or indeed a stock exchange in New York. If you're registered on the New York stock exchange or a European stock exchange, you have to publish what you pay for mining rights. Sounds simple, not so simple. That's where corruption lives because the declared payment and the real payment are often different, as Ngozi can tell you. And so you would think, well, this is an easy piece of legislation. Well, the American Petroleum Institute have sued the SEC to stop it. This is live, this is not abstract, this is real. So when we're walking around the mountains and I'm really enjoying it up here, just remember that these are real in this community. Capitalism can be a great creative force, but it can also be a very destructive force. It is not immoral, but it is amoral. We need to give it some instructions. To tell you, it is our business community representative. I want to say a word here. I share everything that Bono has said, but the private sector is a very broad community. If you take a company like Prudential, Prime Minister, we're one of the top 10 taxpayers in the UK. I'm very proud of that, very proud of that. And also, we have a top taxpayer in Indonesia. You can run a good business. I always say doing well by doing good. What we do as high social utility is a good purpose. We ensure lives. We make a lot of money doing that. And we pay taxes and that's fine. But the point I want to make is actually, we make more money without corruption than with corruption, okay? I was with the Prime Minister of Indonesia, sorry, the Minister of Finance of Indonesia this morning. Our fight across our markets is against corruption. We have a zero-tolerance policy supported by the UK government. And we believe that in the end, the long-term interest of a business community is to operate without corruption. And in the countries where we operate, I actually believe we get better people because the locals who come to work for us know that we don't pay bribes. I've got two or three countries where I've been fined. I've had all kinds of issues because we will not pay a bribe. But that's our stance. And if we have to fight them ten years, we fight them ten years. We're in the country for the long term. And that's it. I'm also, I'm a lot more optimistic. I mean, if you think about this issue of transparency about taxes, about declaring the beneficial ownership of companies, this was, you know, a very, very low-grade issue for many years of gatherings like this. Partly because we put it at the top of the G8. There are some real changes. Over the last year, you see many more countries sign up to the Extractive Industry's Transparency Initiative. You've got the OECD doing amazing work on tax transparency and a proper way of examining where the companies are paying the tax they should in different countries. You've got, I would say, this Britain leading the world with a register of beneficial ownership that will be open and transparent and every G8 country agreeing to an action plan on beneficial ownership. So these issues, which I think are fantastically important in tackling poverty, that were slightly second-order issues. They're now at the front of the international debate. I was talking to Tony Abbott, the Australian Prime Minister about his G20. He's going to be pushing forward the work on transparency. So I agree with Bono, this is still a lot to do, but we should be optimistic that actually this is now moving in a pretty good direction. But they'll pay for the goals. The people will pay for their... These goals, and I like the specificity, by the way, just to put that on record, but they will pay for it. I think the figure is that 400 billion in domestic rules in Africa versus the 40 billion in aid. I mean, it dwarfs it. It's just unlocking. This is an incredible, wealthy continent. The reason why the internet is just... It's just extraordinary in its resources. The resources, of course, are its people, but what's in the ground is just getting what's in the ground into the hands of the people has been made difficult by certain, let's call it, bureaucracies. It's not just the bureaucracies and the laws that need to be passed. But also, you do need action from the accountants and the lawyers. They need to act in a way that does not encourage the use of blind shell companies and all the rest of it. Because you can pass all the laws you like and make all the rules you like. In the end, you need people to act in a proper way. And I think that's going to be part of it, too. Let me do a slightly framing and come to you, Madam Finance Minister. Jasmine mentioned very briefly at the beginning a fact that seems extremely important to this whole discussion. The worst poverty, the grinding poverty, this extreme poverty, actually exists in very different places. A third of it, I think, from the World Bank numbers is in India. And almost another third of it is in countries that are on the precipice themselves, very poor countries, failed states in some cases or at least deeply troubled conflict regions. Doesn't that suggest there actually are two different strategies for approaching this problem? Not really. I think that if you look at the story of what those countries that have lifted people out of poverty massively and allowed for the meeting of the millennium development goals of poverty, like China, has done a lot. If you look at what China has done, what India has begun to do with Malaysia, what other countries, some of the East Asian countries, what did they do? We come back to the basics. I think that one clear thing is that they created jobs. They diversified their economies. They gave people the dignity of work and they lifted them out. At the same time, other countries we also need to look at are those who also created social safety nets. We have the Latin American countries that have done well, Mexico, Brazil, by putting in place a safety net at the bottom so that people can have some basic human needs met and also access to education by using creative means, like conditional cash transfers to get children into school, which is very important, to get maternal health for people. So a combination of these strategies across whether you're a middle income country or a poor country, you need to look at some of these strategies. But I believe that the biggest thing is the dignity of work and looking at sectors. That is why extractive industries, we have to be very careful because many of these industries are very capital intensive and they don't create jobs. The issue is, how does a country use the resources from the extractives to diversify investing and diversify the other aspects of its economy? That's certainly what we're doing. In my country, we have that experience. We've had years of oil-rich resources and that has not created jobs for us. We've done marginally, from 48 to 46% of people who are now in poverty. We have a long way to go and we're looking at why is that? Apart from governance issues, capacity issues, did we really push in the right direction to use the resources we had to develop and diversify? And that's what this administration we're in now is doing. So that would be my support, but just one quick point. The reason why these issues on beneficial ownership and transparency, both in North and South Matter is because they're actually going to provide resources, as Bono was saying, to help us solve some of these poverty problems. And we are very grateful, to be honest, from our perspective, we have been shouting on these issues and they need to have these registries, the need for clarity, the need to help the developing countries. But it's only when it was lifted up to the G8 that it became prominent and we urged the G20 to do this. Because these are resources belonging to us that can be invested in our development. But just to follow up with Prime Minister and then I want to hear from Jasmine, aren't the expectations of India different from the expectations from Ali? Yeah, I would disagree a little bit about saying that it's all one strategy that applies to every country. In this way, when we come to think about how you use aid budgets, for instance, I think we do need to recognize that conflict states, countries affected by wars or famines or conflicts, they don't have any chance of development until they solve those problems. And so one of the things, Justine Greening, my development secretary and I've been doing is actually now, we at 30% of our budget goes to conflict states because I think that some of the poorest people in the world are in those states and they don't have a chance of development until you settle some of those basic problems. And also, and that's why we've taken our aid budget away from India and away from China. Yes, there are lots of very poor people in India and China, but India and China have the resources and ability themselves if they take the right steps to tackle that problem. So the focus of aid budgets, I think, should be increasingly on the broken states where we can make the biggest difference. Jasmine and then Tim. I think what I'd say is that the goals, I think we're in agreement that the goals should be universal and apply equally everywhere. In terms of how you go about achieving those goals in different countries is going to be different. So the strategy is going to be different. I think what we're also talking about is the financing strategy. And it was actually, I think, a board member of the World Food Program who was heard to say that a strategy without financing is nothing but a hallucination. And I think what we're really getting into here is what are the different elements? And in fact, we need all of them for a financing strategy for these goals and we need an overarching financing strategy and then each country will have its own. And each part of it is important. I think we're all saying that the majority of it is going to come from these countries themselves. There are going to be some countries that are going to need a boost of international aid. And I think the international aid is incredibly, it's a relatively small amount, but it's incredibly important and we shouldn't take it for granted. We have got an example of Britain that has met its commitments, but too many countries are not and we can't let countries off their, off the hook. My worry is that, you know, as we are rightly looking for other sources of financing that we sort of forget about the overall mix and the aid is an important part of that. And on companies, I think we've talked a bit about sort of plugging the gaps where bad behavior in companies is actually being a sort of a hole in the bucket, if you like, and is taking the resources away. But we talked a little bit earlier about creating jobs and about, you know, the role that companies can play by using the core of their business to apply that against these goals. And we're seeing that more and more. I mean, we, as Saved Children, we've got a great deal with GlaxoSmithKline where, you know, they've repurposed some of their intellectual property, mouthwash products that can now be used, will be able to be used to save newborn lives because it will be used to treat umbilical calls where infections are big cause of children dying. You know, Tijana and I were talking earlier about, you know, how you're looking at taking the core purpose of your company and applying that. How can micro lending facilities and financial services be rolled out? And I think, you know, there are encouraging conversations and increasingly actions with companies, you know, sort of putting their strategy where their mouth is. And some of those are going on here at Davos. Just three quick points. One on investors because we are an investor as a life company. We have 3% of the London Stock Exchange. I was telling Bono, we need to talk. When companies misbehave and go behind Congress and block your initiatives, we as investors have a very active dialogue with them behind closed doors. And I can guarantee you, it's quite robust and we can dissuade them from doing certain things. I'm really grateful because that new African proverb, pray that we don't discover oil. So there is that, there is that. The second one, and to make the link between corruption and the mobilization of domestic savings. And you've said, Bono, there's a lot of domestic savings in Africa and there because the main reason why we privatized the railroads was that it was actually very profitable that the employees that privatizes to their own benefits, they even had a printing factory to print fake tickets. So the state would get 10% of the revenue and they had 90% of the revenue. Okay, so anyway, to get rid of that. And it's just a small example, but it shows you how corruption comes in the way of mobilizing the domestic resources. We ask money from the outside when we have domestic resources and if our tax administrations are not corrupt, we can then raise those domestic resources and use them to build roads, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I have to take one minute to tell a story because really it made a strong impression on me. I was invited once in the northeast of the Ivory Coast to go and I was always talking a lot about women education and school enrollment for young girls. And that was the part of the country that had the lowest school enrollment rate. And this guy tells me, I'm gonna put 5,000 girls in school. I said, okay, great, I'll come and I'll do the ceremony, et cetera, that's fantastic. And I go there, 800 kilometers from my big job. It took me through a terrible road. It took me four hours. That's a terrible road, no towering to get to the village. And the village chief, when I come, he says, look, minister, we took you through that road because we want you to tar this road. It's a terrible road. It's okay, fine. And we sit down, the ceremony, the singing, the dancing. And I tell him, I said, my friend, what do you do in Abidjan? He says, I'm a customs lieutenant. I'm a customs lieutenant. I said, aha. So that's how you got the money to pay for the 2,000 girls. Ah, that's really interesting. Then I told the village chief, and really, they didn't like me very much, but I said, you know why you don't have a road? Because of him, okay? No, it was really, we got into a fascinating discussion and they got it. I said, you know, he is taking away the money at the customs, he's a corrupt customs officer. That's why you don't have a road. But there's an army of factivists out there now, we call them factivists, but there's a whole new generation. Absolutely. That's just right across the continent, as you know, the smartest, the brightest, the diaspora returning, and they're using technology to sort of turbocharge this transparency revolution. And they just want open government. No, but they solve the problems. You know, that's the really key here at Davos. It's not are we open for business, it's just, are we open? And I think that open government, we get out of, I think there's somebody here from Ushua Aidae, I think it's Julia, there's another Dan from Ibecus. I mean, these are the real stars. They're the ones that are the corruption cops. This is, her nickname in Nigeria is the corruption cop. This is a hero of the continents. And I'm in awe of her. She's very great. One last point on failed states, because my country exploded via every coast on that issue. And I was promoting investment in via every coast in the 90s and I went to Switzerland and to Geneva, all those bankers, all Swiss bankers, it really was not listening to me. And so at Vienna I said, you know, does what I said not make sense? Why didn't you listen? I said, oh, no, no, no, no. We don't invest in countries that have a border with a country in conflict. So young man, you can say everything, you know, we are because it's great, all the statistics, we love it, but we don't do that. So the contagion between those countries. For a while there. So the two-point strategy of helping the middle-income countries, the countries that are doing well, but also fixing the bad places is key. We say in my country, a community should never aspire to be on the way in the desert, because generally it's the desert that wins. So you need to fix both. I just want to weigh in a little bit on the aid discussion and again, commend Norway. We mustn't forget that Norway, for instance, reached its goal a long time ago. And the UK, I think what is interesting about the UK is that it did it at a time of extreme stress, when it might have been politically expedient not to do that. But what I want to say about it, I totally agree with the Prime Minister that on that issue of conflict, I mean, when you're looking at how you deploy your resources, of course, you know, you take the aid way to have the most impact in helping to settle those issues. But beyond that, you have to think about how to leverage even that aid very successfully within the conflict affected countries. And that's where you need very careful strategies that can also pull in the private sector to help provide services. Why are these countries in conflict? Yes, because there may be cultural, whatever issues, but they're also economic issues, often at the bottom of these conflicts. And you know, you need to really get to the heart of these and use the aid to leverage solutions to these economic issues. Solve the absence of services, the absence of jobs. And most of these economies are led into conflict. So I think how do we use aid to leverage these private sector resources that are there? I think that is the key. I think it's such an important point because we actually have to do that if we've got any chance of even meeting the current goals, leaving the next, leaving the next lot, because actually a fifth of the world's population lives in countries affected by conflict and violence. And of that, a half of all people in extreme poverty and a half of all of those children who are still out of school who need to get a basic education. So we're gonna have to focus on those countries. And I think we need to just be a bit more nuanced. We write off, it's a great example. We write off whole countries when there is a bit of sectarian conflict in a particular area. And even bordering countries are now hearing as well. And even within conflict situations, we know from experience on the ground, we can still get children into school. We can still make some of those basic investments that means as the piece is being brokered, the next generation will be able to contribute to their country. Let me quickly try to touch on a couple of other issues. The global economy, of course, doesn't just sit there waiting for all these good things to be done. And the Argentine peso took a stomach churning plunge yesterday, which perhaps was a little bit of a reminder. And the analysts explained it in a great phrase, a negative emerging market sentiment, which was a lot bigger than just Argentina. So there still seems to be a fair amount of resistance among the people with the capital to emerging markets. And Argentina is not exactly a poor country either. Prime Minister, how do we factor that kind of volatility into the next 15 years? Well, I think one of the things we've got to do is talk more confidently about Africa's future. Right now, some of the fastest growing countries anywhere in the world are in Africa. And we need to get the business and economic focus onto the excitement that is the Africa development story. And going to Ngozi's point, that some of the things we ought to be using our aid for are helping drive those engines of development. I mean, for instance, a lot of African infrastructure was built to take things out of Africa rather than trade between African countries. And so there's a huge role for private sector capital and some public sector capital to fix that infrastructure problem. If you look how long it takes to drive a lorry between different African countries transporting goods, there's far too much time at the border, far too much paperwork. There's investment being made by Britain and other countries into trying to help create more free trade within Africa. Now, those sorts of things, I think, then can open the world's investment community into the eyes of the world's investment community and the excitement of this story. But there is a sort of truth in this, though, which I suppose the Argentine story goes to, which is that people don't have to invest in a particular country. And that's why these issues of governance, corruption, transparency are so important because it's those countries that do those things that will find success. Let me touch on a couple of other issues. Gender equity, your high level panel, and everyone else agrees that giving women and girls a stronger position in society leads to economic growth and development. And yet in your country of Nigeria and many other African countries, women and girls are still far behind the men. There are still issues of tribal custom, genital cutting, education levels. Even in countries with women leaders, heroes, as Bono said, these problems remain a huge element of the society. How can the rest of the world make progress when you're still struggling even in your own countries on these issues? Well, let me say that gender equality is not something limited to developing countries. Even here in Davos, there's a problem of gender equality. You're off guard. Yeah. You know, they've done a survey. Only 15% of the participants are women. You know, companies across the world, there's a gender problem. That's why it's a universal goal. But the issue for us is, yes, we have that particularly in the north of my country. What I say is it may be elsewhere, but because we are poorer, we can least afford it. And that is why we have to take the bow by the horns. And because we are not as rich, we have to pay attention to that issue of girls' literacy. Because if you educate girls, you've solved half the problems. Getting women, you know, empowerment. And you know, we have in my country, you find maybe in the south, a lot of women entrepreneurs, even in the north. But there are issues that we have to deal with, girls out of school. So what have we done? We've started, we've just piloted with the help of DFID, a very successful program on conditional cash transfers to get girls into school. We piloted in Kano State to see if it would work. Attendance is up by 40%. So now that we've seen that it works, we are going to spread it around the country. Maternal mortality, these are the things that keep women back. We have one of the worst numbers in the world. And it's not acceptable to us that women should die in childbirth. It's not acceptable as a finance minister. It's not acceptable to my president, who comes from a poor family, his mother had nine children, and only two of them survived. So he's very passionate. So the issue is to get going. So we launched a program himself called Saving One Million Lives. That's where we took the money from the subsidies. You know, we had these world subsidies that we withdrew and it cost a lot of worldwide demonstrations, but he stuck with it. We've taken that money and we're investing it in maternal mortality. You know, training midwives. The Commonwealth just gave a midwifery program an award last year because we've trained so many midwives and health workers to try and help us solve this problem. We are now in eight states in the country we are going to spread it in 2014. So these are the kinds of things you're absolutely right. We must work on that and we are determined to do it. No one will do it for us. Just to build on that, we can't be on the other dates about women's education. Half of the decrease in child deaths in Africa in the last 10 years is attributable to women's education, not to building hospitals or investing in hard infrastructure. It's for soft skills. It's knowing what to do. It's knowing to give water to the baby with diarrhea. It's things like that that make a difference. And if you look also at fertility, an uneducated woman in the countryside will have 8.2 children. An educated woman in the city has 2.1. So a lot of the noise about cultural specificity, et cetera, disappears with education. What you realize is that women across cultures behave the same way, have the same aspirations. We should have children who survive, look after them properly. So add the hearts together about education, education and continuing to invest in them. So let me turn to the future. Let's talk about how we're gonna go forward. Bill Gates was on a panel here at Davos just earlier today and he said that the Millennium Development Goals, even though the world was gonna fall short on some of them, had been a huge success. They really had changed the conversation about poverty. And that the straightforward thing to do was just update them and move on. Why not, Prime Minister? Well, I think that they were great, but they missed some things out. And in particular, I don't wanna sound like a broken record, but they missed out the issues of governance and corruption. And if you look at our goals, if you look at goal number 10, free and universal legal identity like birth registration, ensure people enjoy freedom of speech, association, peaceful protests, access to independent media and information, increased public participation in political process and civic engagement, guarantee the public's right to information and access to government data, reduce bribery and corruption and ensure officials can be held accountable. None of that is covered by the MDGs. All of that is in our reports. I think we've taken the best of the MDGs, put them into this new framework. And I think the key now is to make sure that these don't get dropped. I mean, just on the last conversation we're having, on gender equality, which is our goal number two, it's in there to end child-enforced marriage. And I think that would be a great thing to a goal to set for the world. And that applies to countries like mine, which have still got girls disappearing from school. And suddenly you find they've been forced into a marriage against their will on the other side of the world. And it's going to be a test, I think, for the NGOs and for the UN and for the international community. Are we going to keep the specifics that are in here? Because I think it would be a real tragedy if we were to lose them. It's a specificity that I'm attracted to that you just read out. You know, our manager, Paul McGinnis, he used to always say to me, oh, what's this about? I'll rock against bad things. And, you know, I just have it sort of drilled into me since I was a teenager. Be specific. Take on, you know, things that you can achieve. And for those of us, if you like, part of the movement, we have to be very careful that we don't, like the grand old Duke of York, you know, just lead everybody up the behalf of, you know, down again. It's like we have to, we have to, we have to, this has to be real. And we have to have the ownership of it, as I say, because with the ownership of it, you'll have this movement that will develop around it that will ensure it's actually, that it is enacted. That's what I'm really most excited by this specificity. I, it's strange because, you know, I'm the singer here, I'm the sort of, you know, I write lyrics, but I go off poetry when it comes to these kinds of things. I like, I like hard logic, lines. But let me ask one poetic question that will come to Jasmine Whitbread. Oh, dear. What should we call these? Oh, there's a shite name. Sustainable Development Goals doesn't... I mean, it's already the Millennium Development Goals with a shite name. Sustainable Development Goals is another shite name. Sounds like a transmittable disease. It does. It sounds like a bad heavy metal band from earlier on. So it is. But it's like... And that's, that is part of the problem in people owning them, is this, I don't have a better name, but I'll tell you, I have a picture in my mind of kids born in 2000, when the first Millennium Development Goals were launched. There'll be 15, and now it's the first one. And there'll be 30, and they're the Millennials. And they, that, just a picture of them. I wonder what would happen if we asked them to call it. Well, how about a global contest to name the goals? Yeah, I mean, I think it could be fun as well to involve more conversation. The High Level Panel really did a job of consultation, but if you walk down any street, in any city, in any country, and you mention Millennium Development Goals, they will just look at you. And, you know, in my band, people, and they're really supportive of red and mumble, they're just, you can see the eyes rolling. So we want ownership by the larger population. Well, I just think, again, it's not either or. We've got to be addressing this at many different levels. We've got to have a great name, a great campaign, and engage, and that's one thing that has got to be different. You know, so for Bill Gates, you know, the goals were perfect as they were for, you know, the kind of driving for results that he was looking for. But in terms of, and he had the resources, you know, to be able to focus on some things that he wanted to. But in terms of building much wider constituency, we do need to build on, not throw out the last set of goals. Definitely keep that, but build on them. So we do need an overarching kind of marketing campaign, a great name. Then I think we need a limited number of goals. I'm in the camp of having a limited number of goals focused on people. It's about people, not process. And I think that's what's going to be inspiring. And then, yes, we do need some enabling goals, a sort of a second order, but equally important, but probably not where you go out there communicating around. In order to make sure that all children get an education and children don't die and people don't go hungry, then there's some enabling goals that people need to be held accountable for because I think that's what we're going for, accountability. Then we need strategies, you know, we need plans. And if we're honest, the last set of goals, we kind of made those, we, you know, the countries, what the strategies for taking them forward were kind of made up as we went along. And in some cases, they were good, in some cases, they were not so good. If you ask everyone, the ones that we consult in the development, they do, that corruption is right at the top of their list. So it is, I think that is a very specific, that would be responding. I think that's an important one. The work we did in terms of consulting people, I mean, it was obviously jobs and livelihoods and poverty, but corruption and justice came through over and over again. And I think if you take Bono's picture of these kids aged 30, that would be something, the right to a voice as well as a job is very important for me. Can I jump in there and say what was fascinating to me in this issue of corruption governance is that they wanted to be involved in holding governments accountable for this. And they wanted to be part of it. So what we need to figure out also in these strategies is how can we, they want to use new technology, as Bono said, they want to use various means to be part of what monitoring, unlike what we had in the past when we had institutions, such as the one I was in, the World Bank, we used to do the monitoring report to see where we are. People don't seem to want only that anymore. They want to be part of that monitoring. So we also have to think about it. If these goals are going to be owned, this big thing that the Prime Minister is talking about of when we listen to people of accountability, how will we get them involved in monitoring? And we haven't quite, I mean... But they're already doing it, aren't they? We just help them by kind of getting out of their way and making the business open and government. So there's a pain in the arse as a finance minister when you've got, you know, you publish with your books and you have, you know, rent a crank on the phone, going, oh, I wouldn't have done that. I mean, in Ireland, I mean, very, by the way, proud of the Irish aid and sticking by it too. But, you know, in Ireland, it's murder. You know, we, everyone in the pub is our T-shirt. But we must have responsible civil society organizations also monitoring in countries. And, you know, indigenous, we don't want non-governmental individuals, NGIs. We want true NGOs and CSOs who will also take responsibility and be themselves open, transparent and accountable themselves. I'd like to be optimistic here, really, because if you look at, you know, the average age in the EU is 41.5 years old. In South East Asia, it's 27. In Africa, it's 18.6 or 19. So the young African, we're all kind of old, I'm with Bono on this. They're way ahead of us, okay, in terms of education, in terms of what they want and their demand for accountability, I think, I think he's huge. So I think we should focus, I'll go like a private secretary. If I take our company, we had six targets from 09 to 13. And then I launched a new program in December with a target from 13 to 17. And there's only three. So it, of course, potential has more than three objectives. But this is a communication exercise. So you need a catchy name. You need a small number of very clear, simple to communicate objectives. And then you can have a whole battery of things you want to achieve below. And if I made us through one more thing, I would say something on education. I'd go with absolute numbers also because the thing we're reducing the poverty by half is that the people in extreme poverty have increased in Africa from 200 to 400 million. So we're saying we've achieved the goal and we've doubled the number of people in extreme poverty. So let's go with absolute numbers. So Derek, as the Prime Minister, how do we get a simple, clear message and a limited number of goals through a United Nations process? Well, I think, first of all, we need the NGOs and the campaigners, I Bono, to give us the campaign. You know, the Drop the Debt campaign was a great campaign. Debt relief is a very complicated thing. There are a lot of different things that have to be done, but there was one headline. The Make Poverty History campaign was about lots of complicated things. So we need that campaign from the NGOs, from people, from charities. Exactly, right? Fantastic. That would be a great... Make it work, make it work. Eventually, make it history. Well, we're working. So we need that to happen. We need the UN to go through its processes, but I think it needs to feel, I hope, a lot of pressure from people and from governments and prime ministers and civil society organisations to say, don't drop the good stuff that's here, the specifics that are really important and the ones that are new, particularly on the governance and corruption side, don't drop that. Don't give in to pressure from some countries that won't like it. Try and stick with that, and above all, keep the inspiring overall goal of eradicating extreme poverty. So I would... Look, we authored this report and we're very proud of it, so we want the end result to be as close to it as possible. And we hope that if they do move away from it, then they'll give some pretty good reasons because we think we had a good crack at it. Jasmine Woodbrun. Well, I just wanted to endorse the fact that, just because I said there should be people-focused goals and I still think there are, I absolutely hear exactly the same thing. Save Your Children works with 45 million children every year and the young people within that bracket that we talked to as part of our concert, they were saying exactly, not surprisingly, they're probably the same children. They were saying exactly the same thing. They want accountability. They want a mechanism for holding... Those who've held up their hands, whether it's businesses or their own governments or foreign governments, they want to be able to hold people to account. And I think technology can help, but they also told us that they want to be able to contribute. So this is not being done for them, it's being done with them and they want ways to be able to contribute. And I kind of hear what you're saying, Bono, about just get out of their way, but... That's what I mean by get out of the way, Ben. I think there's more that could be done and I know that there are some Southern Civil Society, Civicus and others are looking about, could there be a big global dashboard where young people all around the world can kind of post their... I went to the clinic for my sister and they weren't able to help because I wasn't able to pay or they've just introduced... Nigeria's got the health bill through and now I am actually able to get the health services that I need. So it's some way of amalgamating and I think that with the kind of brain power in this room... I just meant the obstacles and they're sometimes not obvious. And we're so proud of drop the debt, it's like $110 billion cancels and Ngozi dropped her own debt, paid for it in Nigerian budget with the oil benefits there and was mostly invested in education by... smart African leaders. But the thing about this is broader, this is not aid-based and I think of Mo Ibrahim coming up to me and saying, this transparency stuff is way more important than debt cancellation because this empowers us. These are the obstacles that you collude with that are in our way and you ask what it is and it's business and that's why we're here in Dallas. We have just three minutes left. Let me just ask each of you this final question. Where do we need to be a year from now as we come back to Davos and we head into the final stage of this new process that we don't have a name for yet? What do we need to be doing? And very briefly, Jasmine... So we need to have picked up the pace on the current goals. We need everybody in the room here, everybody watching to think about how they can help contribute and we need to have made a lot more progress in the next year to get us much more closely on target to these goals because nothing breeds success like success and where we've had big breakthroughs, that will mean and that's what gives us, I think, the confidence for us to say that we should be going for zero absolute poverty and we should be, you know, really going for these universal goals. Prime Minister, I agree with... We should use the time to complete as many of the MDGs as we can but what we need between now and next year, we need Bono and the creative people to come up with a name and a campaign but what we need the UN to do is to agree a set of goals, I think, close to what we had that are specific, that are measurable, that are inspiring and that apply to everyone. I want to go back to what Angosi said. That was one of the big conclusions we came to. You can't have a set of goals handed from rich countries to poor ones. This is for everybody because the corruption, justice and transparency stuff, a lot of that is for us to do. So they've got to be global. I'm going to skip over Bono and come back to you at the end. Akanjo Iwala. I think a year from now, we must have a clear set of goals agreed by the UN that marries issues of development with issues of climate change, eradication of poverty. We want to see them, we want the specificity. We want, I want to echo what Prime Minister Cameron said. We want these very specific suggestions and results put into these goals. So that's what I'm aiming for. And a year from now, we hope to see that and the strategy is underpinning it. Tijantiam. I think it's not countries who change it's the people in the countries. Everybody's marveling at the way Africa has changed. It's not Africa that has changed. It's Africans who have changed. Okay, the sky is the same, the land is the same, the rain is the same. It's people with behaviors that change. So that's what we want. We want them to own, as Bono said many times, those goals, whatever they are, to feel a sense of ownership which will give us confidence in your private sector that this is really driven by the people in country. They're the only ones who can change their country. And I can go in there and do things confident that this will stay. So we want a small number of goals endorsed by the UN with the support of the British government, all the other governments so that we can get on with it and reduce poverty in those countries. Bono, the Prime Minister gave you an assignment as I understand it. We have a year. Do you want to give us a first draft of the inspiring message? Look, extraordinary, that'll be good. Extraordinary things happen in Davos, none more extraordinary than an Irish rock star complimenting a conservative British Prime Minister for his leadership in the fight against extreme poverty. Anything can happen. I think that's all that's happened. Thanks, dude. And I'm a top-line Melody guy. And I'll try and help with this assignment, but I have a feeling it's people not in this room are going to execute it. And what I'll say is in a year's time will be 30 years from live aid and something will happen in honor of that. And I hope that myself and Bob Geldof are nothing to do with the organization of just guests. Thank you. Amen. Thank you. Thank you. Well, that does wrap up in an excellent way our AP Davos debate. I want to thank our panelists and our audience. You've clearly laid out a job of work for the whole world, big task ahead, both for the next year and coming up with the course of action and then executing over the 15 years after. I'm Mike Oreskis and this has been the AP Davos debate. Thank you.