Development Priorities Quotes

The economic development of the country must come first. Education and the raising of the standards of the people will follow. Afterwards political development may be possible.

It makes no sense to spend precious resources on propping up loss-making, state-owned enterprises when they could be used to get more children into school or provide more midwives to reduce the number of mothers dying in childbirth.

I'm very skeptical of the amount of money that goes into military expenditure, not just in the poor countries [but] also in the rich. I think it's one of the most massive wastes in the world, but education is [at the] other end. It's the bearer of the greatest fruits that mankind has ever known.

If you try to put social and cultural development ahead of economic development, it doesn't work. You have to do it all together.

To ask a country with 750 million people living on less than a dollar a day to optimize their development for the environment as opposed to getting food in the mouths of these people and giving them a decent lifestyle, that's just a little bit too much to ask.

I think given all the different imperatives - getting energy to Africa, security of energy, climate change, that we should be spending half as much as we spend on health, which will get you all the way up to $15 billion - the health people don't like it when things get compared to their number.

Beg, borrow, steal, Africa needs to build infrastructure.

To build a road is so much simpler than to think of what the country really needs.

Money spent on carbon cuts is money we can't use for effective investments in food aid, micronutrients, HIV/AIDS prevention, health and education infrastructure, and clean water and sanitation.

We don't really talk about our future plans. But we, at the same time, try to build things that our users ask us for.

We must focus much more on developing countries' own policies and priorities, and increase policy and operational coherence between national, regional and multilateral actors.

I don't consider the first-world concerns any less important than the third-world ones.

We tend to put the environment last because we think the first thing we have to do is eliminate poverty and send children to school and provide health.

The idea that there is one kind of African is, of course, ridiculous. Sometimes African entrepreneurs want to kill you because you are saying public health is the priority, not roads. Of course they are right to press for that issue, but so are we right, I believe, to argue, for example, that millions of children could and should be vaccinated.

The importance of Africa's development to the entire world should be self-evident. And yet, despite the high stakes, Europe - and the international community more broadly - have not devoted the attention and resources that the issue merits.

What I can say now about paid DLC is that we aren't working on anything at the moment. We've put all our efforts into making the actual game. Creating DLC would involve large additional costs and require the involvement of a lot of people.