London Debate Quotes

Solomon Ayalew

"Preventing diseases means hygiene, and for that you need education, health education, and I see mobile phones as one possible source of that information."

"Subsidizing consumption in Africa, technical assistance in Africa.....these are just not sustainable. Europe and America cannot continue giving subsidies to Africa."

"I see trade liberalisation in the long run to be useful but in the short run, I think it might destroy the economy of developing countries, I will explain. Trade liberalisation today means like putting two boxers in a ring, one is well trained heavy-weight boxer, the other one is untrained and in a fraction of a second the untrained person will be dead."

"There is an emerging view that Africa needs fair trade more than assistance."

"If the U.S. can send a huge army to Iraq I don't think it would be difficult to send 20,000 election monitors to an African country."

"In development it is very difficult to talk about one or two problems because there are so many."

"Development is not just economics. I think that development in Africa is more about politics."

"We have seen that in the last 30 years the only region that went backward was sub-Saharan Africa. Backward in real terms, real economic terms, a decline in GDP. All the assistance has failed, all the efforts have failed. So we have to remember that one of the biggest problems in Africa is that our social structure is not ideal for development."

"I think that we should do more than what we are doing to put pressure on African governments (to embrace democracy)."

Lars Rebien Sorensen

"Lack of access to health is primarily driven by poverty."

"If the world were like Denmark where I come from the business of business would be business. But the world is not like Denmark. As a consequence actors on the global scene, private companies like ourselves will often find ourselves in situation where we have to take upon ourselves roles for which we really have no legitimacy."

"There is believed to be five times more people with diabetes that with AIDS is developing countries."

"In the area of diabetes there is a funding problem, but there's foremost a knowledge problem and a capacity problem."

"I have to admit that I'm not proud of the fact that the pharmaceutical industry was not foresightful enough to see that it is not sustainable to offer drugs at $15,000 per year treatment to developing countries. That was not working and I think the industry ended up realising that."

"A problem that I see in relationship to medicines for developing countries is that there are areas where we as private companies have no research because there is no market."

"Why not ask for liberalisation of our markets for entry on the products that can be produced in Africa? The market economy capitalism only works with some regulation and with a well-existing social infrastructure, otherwise it becomes brutality."

"We should have institutions and social welfare systems that can transition workers or farmers into new sectors which are more sustainable long-term than preventing products from the developing countries from entering."

"I am convinced that the private sector can play an important role in development."

"I used to have nightmares about NGOs - Oxfam and others - when they called me. Now I am delighted to work with them because it is highly motivating, they have a different perspective of the world than we have. And through working together, and also with the government, it is highly enriching for private companies such as ours."

Robert Annibale

"Micro-finance is about those people which have been missed by the banking system, and that's a very large number of people."

"What we're demonstrating at Citibank is that you can, on a sustainable commercial basis, bank low income people."

"If you want to reach scale, if you want to reach millions of people that need access to basic financial services, you need to show that you can do it on a commercially sustainable way."

"It (selling mobile phones) has become a micro-entrepreneur's business. One of the things Grameen Telecom has actually done is make tens of thousands of women buy a mobile phone, they take a small loan to buy the phone and they set up a kiosk in their village and they become the telephone booth of the village. You just skip a whole generation of telephone lines that would have to be brought in otherwise."

"Business is not a solution to the problems of development, but it is a participant in some of the tools of development."

"Business should do what its expertise is and what its capacity is and you should not always expect that it is the best one to make the broader social or development decisions."

"Latin America received last year some $47 billion of remittances. It was more than all foreign direct investment and official flows combined. And that came from those thousands and thousands of small monthly transfers that were made by migrant workers."

Robert Conway

"There are four billion people on this planet who have no access to communications, they have never made a phone call. They are the unconnected......But guess what, nearly 75-80 percent of them are covered by a mobile system."

"The way I begin most conferences is by saying: Ladies and Gentlemen, please turn on your mobile phones."

"The way people use mobile phones in emerging market will surprise us in the way that they create economic and social values in the use of those phones."

"Do you need to read to use a phone? No. No. A phone has two buttons that are important, a green button and a red button. Green make a call and send it, red stop it. Do you need to read a manual? No."

"I think that some governments have come to conclude that facilitating the take-up of mobile phones is society is actually one of the foundation stones for the democratic process."

Dr. Kurt Hoffman

"We've not been very successful in using aid, public money, to generate economic growth. Usually when it's there in great numbers it tends to lead to a reduction in economic growth and things like democracy and reform and so on."

"One of the things that's missing (from the economic development sphere) is that the paradigm of aid and public sector solutions is still dominant."

"Business has a real opportunity to get its value creators - people who manage supply chains and procurement and do risk assessment etc. - to find ways to work to transfer their skills and their business DNA to civil society."

Richard Quest

"We all accept that the developing world got shafted in the Uruguay Round."

Andrew Jowett, HarvestHelp

"Creating opportunity is the key to reducing poverty."

Karin Christiansen, Overseas Development Institute

"One of the big statistics that we have is around elections actually generating greater levels of conflict. It is one of the big predictors of high levels of civil war and violence."

"The reason why there's very little active business or it is at such a low level in large numbers of these countries is because of the failure of states to provide regulatory frameworks and policy frameworks that actually lend support to the development of business."

"The aid industry has I think in a lot of countries fundamentally undermined the development of strong responsive government."

Richard Boulter, Department for International Development

"If we talk about the aid industry, or the development industry, have we yet convinced these groupes that the business of development is business?"

John Elkington, SustainAbility

"Instead of trying to engage more and more NGOs should companies be going out and trying to engage social entrepreneurs."