 Fifteen years ago, a Haitian priest asked me to come to Haiti to help him build a bank the poor could call their own. I asked him at that time, well what kind of services are you planning to provide? He said all the normal things, savings, loans, money transfers. Along the way, he also explained that you can't just give a woman a loan and send her on her way. You have to accompany her as she struggles to make her way out of poverty. I realized later that what that meant is we were going to have to teach her how to read and write, we were going to have to give her business skills, and then before we knew it we were into health care too. So gradually we built this staircase out of poverty. Our staircase out of poverty has five different steps to it. At every step, there's a different mix of financial, educational and health care services that will allow the woman to make the next step. Our job is to get them on this ladder and be there for them when they fall off. We're talking about very, very, very poor people. But over the years, as our strategy expanded, I came to two realizations. The first one is that accumulation of assets doesn't mean much of anything unless you can protect those assets. I have seen women who made their way to the top and then got knocked down because they had to pay for a funeral or because there was a bad hurricane season. In fact, I've seen the same woman, the same woman fall three times in the last six years. I simply can't continue to do my business this way. I can't encourage her to save and reinvest her profits back into her business and use credit wisely and then watch her fail because of a hurricane. And the second one was that not everyone is a micro-entrepreneur. Many of these people need jobs. They can make their way out of poverty, but not by opening their own businesses. And job creation, most experts would agree, is really best done by the small and medium enterprise sector. But in Haiti, where there's 70% unemployment, almost everybody has to be an entrepreneur. Clearly, we have to find a way to create jobs for these people. So here we are dealing with the very poorest people, trying to eliminate extreme poverty. And yet we're having to put our attention on job creation by assisting the small and medium enterprises instead of just focusing on the poorest people. That's a tricky thing when you're an institution with a mission to focus on the very poorest. People see that as you're drifting away from your mission. You're going upmarket. But in order to help them, we also have to be able to create jobs for them. The point is that eliminating extreme poverty is not rocket science. We don't have any reason that we have to have the degree of poverty in that country that we do have today.