Bill Clinton: “Let me say that this is--give him a hand--[applause]--this is a fairly typical experience worldwide. I got interested in…”

“Let me say that this is--give him a hand--[applause]--this is a fairly typical experience worldwide. I got interested in this 15 years ago, when I met a man who was trained in the United States and went home to Bangladesh and founded--one of the poorest countries in the world--founded a community bank making microenterprise loans to poor village women, average about--then--probably $20. Today, they average about $50. But that's a lot of money, in American terms, given the size of their economy, and they had a 96 percent repayment rate. Now he's made millions of these loans, in a country with 100 million people. So I'm--one of the things I'm quite proud of is that now, under our administration, we now fund 2 million microenterprise loans every year in poor, poor villages in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America. But again I say, if it's good enough for us to do for them--which we need to do, so those countries can keep their democracies alive and be good citizens and not cause wars and have a decent life--it's certainly good for America. And my only regret is that we don't give ten times as many of them every year. And if we have institutions like Arizona Multibank and MICRO everywhere--we have the networks out there, again, to make the contacts--I think there's really very little limit to what we can do in getting more money for microloans, because they plainly work. Is the average person, the average size of the business a single employee, self-employed? Or is it two? Mr. Gordon. It's a sole proprietor, sir.”