 Okay, is this where, yep, I may have to hold it up close. Good morning, everybody, welcome. Very, very happy to have you here. And I always judge the success. I know it's gonna be a successful meeting, but by how much energy it takes to settle people down. There's a lot of energy in the room, and that's good. And I think that's because it's genuinely such an exciting topic, and we're glad to have a chance to explore it with you today. I'll just apologize if I say something really stupid. I do that all the time, but today I have a good excuse. I just got off an airplane from California, and so I just, fair warning, in case this turns out dopey. Let me just take a minute. My role here really is to introduce Henrietta Forre, but I'd like to provide a bit of context for it a little bit, I think to give a sense of the importance of the conference and the importance of her role in really making this possible. When I came to CSS back in 2000, and fresh in my mind, was the difficulty that we had had trying to reconstruct a functioning economy in the Balkans. We had just fought a very difficult war, it was cooled off, but by no means settled in Bosnia. And I can remember one of the last visits that I took to Bosnia. I was its deputy secretary of defense at the time. And remember sitting down with our commander, and I said, well, tell me, what is it that you need more than anything? What is it that I can be doing? He says, I'll tell you what I need most is I need a little bit of spending money that I can use to help start economic activity in these cities. And I said, okay, tell me more. He said, well, if I come rumbling into a village with Bradley fighting vehicles and everybody's sitting on top with their M16s, cocked and ready, it's pretty hard to get people to work with you. But if I can sit down with the mayor and say, mayor, I've got about $100,000, I don't know exactly what I'm gonna do with it, but if you've got some ideas how we could work together, I'd like to work with you. And it completely changed the landscape. Now, it was a very hard time for us in Washington at that time, because we were going through base closures. And there were an awful lot of politicians up on Capitol Hill who were saying, well, why the hell should we be giving them money to start their economy when you have to close a base over here? I don't wanna do it. And I said, well, this is not helping them, it's helping us. This is one of the tools it takes to be successful to accomplish our goals. It was very hard. Now, that's not unlike where we are right now. If you think about it, we're going to have a very, very difficult debate over these next couple of years, because the economy is hurting, people are smarting in their anxiety and their fear. And it's pretty easy to get too narrow in the way we think about what we're trying to do overseas. And you're going to see a real push for contraction in this. We wanna do something about that. Now, about four years ago, five years ago, we launched a project here with Joe Nye and Rich Armitage, and it was called Smart Power. And it was an effort to try to say, how do we start restoring all of the range, all of the tools that are available to the government in its full arsenal so that it can be effective for its diplomacy and its outreach? Candidly, we missed one thing. And I'll take responsibility for it. We missed this, the role that the private sector and private sector incentives play in our foreign policy. Now, in the last, the one person who got it, who understood it, and that was Henrietta Four. Henrietta was, she had served in the administration, but in the last, what, two years? Two years, Henrietta was the administrator for USAID. And of course, USAID is on the front line all the time. But she saw that we needed to do something new with this and started to develop this pioneering work. Rob Mosbacher's down here. Rob was down at overseas private investment corporation. He was doing the same thing in his orbit and starting to say, what do we do to harness these tools? And there's a great deal of energy in the private sector that isn't recognized in Washington. We're a government town. We're not a business town. And so we tend to ignore this powerful attribute. And in recent, recent months, there've been some very important intellectual contributions to it. Carl Schramm was the head of the Kauffman Foundation. And Bob Lighton's here. Bob, I'm delighted you're here. You're gonna keynote here at lunch. Has coined this term expeditionary entrepreneurship or capitalism, is that what it is? Economics. Economics, yeah. See, just because I flew through the night, I'm sorry. I'm stupid, I have a good excuse. But it's the idea that there is enormous energy that comes from the entrepreneurial impulse in people. And I'll tell you, you see that. You don't need to teach people to try to help themselves. That's a fairly robust impulse that seems to be in the human condition. The question is the barriers that tend to get in the way. And what do we do about that? So we're going to explore that today. We're going to be talking with each other. And by that, I mean, we really are talking with each other. You have a very important role in the success of this conference. To start pulling out of our speakers. And I wanna say thank you to everybody. I'll let Dan Rundy and others take the lead in doing this. But I'd say thank you to them for this. This is a start of something new for us. We're going to devote considerable effort over the next three years on this issue. I think it comes at a time when Washington is becoming self-absorbed and preoccupied with its own internal tensions and processes. And we're going, we have an opportunity to really lose momentum at a time when America is recovering its role in the world and the people want that. And we're going to use this opportunity to put life into it. And Henrietta started the way and Rob started the way when they were in government and we're going to be picking it up and hopefully introducing this in a much more systematic way in the years ahead. Forgive me, Henrietta, I was not, I was just supposed to introduce you. But I can't help resists on my little pulpit to give little sermonettes occasionally. And so forgive me for that. Henrietta Ford is probably emblematic of the impulse we're going to explore today. She's been a very successful business woman in her own right, but has chosen to devote portions of her life trajectory as a public leader as well. She was in the Bush administration, she first started as the head of the U.S. Mint and then moved over to the State Department, first to be the Undersecretary for Administration. And then when Secretary Rice needed a new leader and a real leader for USAID, she picked Henrietta. And things just snapped up, it was really wonderful. And in that process, she saw the power of linking the private sector, the impulse to do well with the impulse to do good. And it was a hallmark of what we think has a potential, much, it's untapped, completely untapped, and we're going to explore that today. So welcome, Henrietta Ford, and thank her for the work she did and the work she's gonna continue to do with us here. Henrietta, thank you. Thank you very much, John. I've always wanted to be emblematic. I never really thought before about being an emblem, but I like this, John. So John, thank you, and I have told John that he should be off doing work, but maybe it's off to do a nap, would be good for John. So thank you all very much for being here. And it's true that Rob Mosbacher and I worked together in the Bush Administration, so did Connie Duckworth, and she's been hard at work everywhere, and Bob Litton, and we just missed Dan Rundy. So I know there are some lots of good friends here in the audience, and I'm delighted to have all of you. You know that this is a subject that is near and dear to my heart, and I think it is an extremely important time for our country, but it's also an important time for CSIS, so I am delighted that this program has started. And since this is the first conference of this newest program, let me just remind you the name of the program. It is the Project on Prosperity and Development, which I think is actually a very fine title, and we will expect it to flourish and grow in many ways. As our computers always tell us, watch this space within CSIS. I think you'll see lots of interesting and innovative and imaginative areas coming forth. The project is set to elevate the private sector as a central role for development policy, and I think that's gonna be very important, because if we prioritize private enterprise and private sector development, it will lead to economic growth. Our experience in programs around the world is that when you partner with the private sector, there is a better outcome. The economic growth outcomes, the results from our programs is better. We also find that after natural disaster or in war-torn areas, the first area that we turn to is economic growth. And third, whenever you partner with a private sector, the impacts on our interests, our United States interests are strong, and it is in our strategic, our national interest. So these are all areas that I know you will go through today and you will be exploring. But when I first came to the development field more than 20 years ago, prior to sector funding and assistance was about 30% of the total development foreign assistance program, and we in government were mighty and strong, and around the world we were about 70%. By the time I became administrator, those numbers had swapped so that the private sector was 70% and we in government were 30%. After the Bush administration's enormous increase in foreign assistance and the Obama administration's enormous increase in foreign assistance, the numbers now are even wider. 80% is private sector and 20% is government. So it's also reality, and thus the connections between these sectors and how we do development is extremely important for all of us. When the food and the energy crisis hit us about four years ago, we had been lulled into thinking that the private sector was doing well around the world in the United States and other countries. But all of a sudden, we could not do agriculture programs because we had closed them up. We thought that they were being done elsewhere. We didn't carry something very precious called economic growth money. And as a result, we couldn't work on energy programs. We couldn't work on economic growth and policy programs. We couldn't work on food programs. So in talking with our friends and colleagues on the hill in a bipartisan way, it became understood that we had just neglected some of these areas. And so we are now back thinking about them as a nation. And thus this is very timely as a topic. President Obama has called the Entrepreneur's Summit and I congratulate the administration and the president for that. And Secretary Clinton has the Global Entrepreneur's Summit Leaders and they're building toward the APEC Summit in the fall in San Francisco when they will showcase entrepreneurship again. And I think this is very important for us as a country. An entrepreneur is a person who is building a living and an enterprise. So an entrepreneur does not have to be someone who is taking their small company onto the public markets. It could be a small holder farmer in Tanzania. It could be a small retailer in Peru, a market woman in Liberia like President Sirleaf's mother. Could be a bicycle repair shop owner on the West Bank. Could be a health clinic doctor in Vietnam. Or it could be a weaver of rugs in Afghanistan. Secretary Clinton said that aid chases need and investment chases opportunity. And I agree with this. I think we have a very important opportunity ahead. And we need to invest in and with entrepreneurs around the world. Development was elevated into being part of the 3Ds, development, diplomacy and defense during the Bush administration. And it's been carried on very strongly during the Obama administration. There is a sobering statistic that you all know that within the developing world where we are working in foreign assistance, 60% of the countries are in conflict at one time or another. And this underscores the need to tie development with diplomacy and defense. There is another trend that is moving along that all of us has seen, which is demographic. There is a youth bulge. From 1970 to 1999, 80% of the civil conflicts were in countries where 60% or more of the population was under the age of 30. There are 67 countries right now with a youth bulge and in 60, they are in conflict. What they need is employment, they need job training, they need to promote entrepreneurship and we all need to promote it in this demographic. So what is the role of policy? It is important, it is necessary and yet it cannot operate alone. Many years ago, the World Bank and USAID developed a report called the Doing Business Report. Among others, it graded the ease of starting a business and the ease of doing business and in the past five years, 85% of the countries have made it easier to start and to run a business within their country. Some of us have been following with respect President Kagame in Rwanda and his efforts, he really began to focus on this and he started a special office in the government which would look at the regulations, try to clear away bureaucracy and try to speed up the ability with which businesses could form. It has made a great difference and Rwanda moved from 158th on the list to 58th on the list and this is in six years. Finance though is also critical. So with a policy, one must pair finance. There are a number of development credit authorities. Let me mention at least one that USAID has which is a partial loan guarantee program. It allows you to mobilize loans, microfinance, mortgages for low income homeowners, student loans, small and medium sized business loans. It also allows non-banks to carry finance like root capital for the agricultural sector. It has currently moved $2 billion worth into the finance sectors and that is important and that's since its inception. But it encourages banks to lend to local institutions and organizations. It also encourages lending across all sectors and it gives borrowers a chance to develop a credit history. So in this CSIS project, and I see that David Abshire has just joined us so it's a good time to mention CSIS, welcome David, on prosperity and development. It supports freedom and ownership and prosperity. It will work with public and private sectors. It is non-partisan. It is a voice to make our US development efforts more effective. It will support private sector development and public-private partnerships. It knows it is a multi-actor, multi-stakeholder, multi-polar and multi-interest world. And it showcases the rapidly expanding worldwide interest in social entrepreneurs, in social philanthropy, in strategic partnerships, in shared value concepts that you will hear about from some of the leaders today. Carl Schramm has indeed, as John Hamry mentioned, written a very interesting article about expeditionary economics and the support of entrepreneurs in the time of conflict and disaster areas. USAID did a study not long ago in which we looked at what were the important factors to start up when a country was just emerging from conflict. And the number one area became economics. What is important is to start the livelihoods going for a family after a conflict, and that means that the economic piece is essential. We also did a study about conflict in Africa, and the average conflict in Africa last seven years. The time it takes for a country to reach its GDP level that it was at prior to conflict is 14 years. So if you have seven years of conflict, another 14 years to bring the country back, you have an effect lost to generation. And when you do that, you have to have economic growth and economic models working all during the conflict. And thus we have the issue that Carl brought up, which is how do you work in expeditionary economics and how do you work in development in times of conflict? Let me close with two thoughts from one from Afghanistan and one from Haiti. In Afghanistan, we've made a great deal of progress. 60% of the Afghans have access to health clinics. There've been dramatic increases in the number of children attending school, more than 2 million girls and more than 3 million boys. It's the highest it's been in history and most Afghans will tell you that what is remarkable is when you are driving down the road or walking down the road and you see a little girl walking to school with books under her arm. But it will change Afghanistan. But what Afghanistan now has before them is an enormous challenge of how to get the country moving economically. And so what we are talking about today in the public-private partnerships and entrepreneurship is a key for Afghanistan. And the second area let me just mention is Haiti. I am pleased to be a member of the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund Board and our main focus is how to get the private sector moving. We were asked if the two presidents, presidents Bush and Clinton, would work on the long-term reconstruction for Haiti. And we have focused in on how to help small, medium-sized businesses, how to get shopkeepers and artisans and banks moving, how to get the policies right so that businesses can start and they can grow. And coming back full circle with the Development Credit Authority, they just put out their two billionth dollar and it was in Haiti and it was trying to encourage loans going out to these small businesses in Haiti. So in conclusion, let me say that trade and free enterprise drive prosperity and development around the world. And after disasters and in the midst of conflict with individuals working to build their own lives and their own communities and their own nations, what is important is that we help them in the economic side. This is smart power and this is American power. And I ask all of you to join with John Hamry with CSIS and help Dan Rundey and his team to capture the best practices and areas for improvement to develop concrete and actionable recommendations. So let me turn to Dan Rundey, our project leader. I have watched him lead in USAID and in the IFC and he has always exceeded expectations. So Dan, we're gonna be expecting the same from you for this program. Thank you very much.