Bill Clinton: “If I could just give you one example, because I think this may have also relevance for remote, physically remote areas…”

“If I could just give you one example, because I think this may have also relevance for remote, physically remote areas in America, Appalachia, the Native American reservations, things of this kind. We were talking before we came in here tonight. I was out in northern California the weekend before last. And I was talking with a lot of people who work for eBay, and they were telling me that there are now, in addition to the employees of eBay, over 20,000 people who make a living on eBay, buying and selling and trading, and that a fair number of these people were actually people who once were on welfare, who moved from welfare to work. That is, from--and presumably a lot of them work, didn't have a lot of formal education. They had made this jump, and a market had been created for them, where they lived, that otherwise would be alien to their own experience. They wouldn't have been able to go down to the bank and get a loan and on and on and on. Now, last year we made and this year we will make, through our aid programs in foreign countries over 2 million microenterprise loans to poor people, to help them start their businesses in Africa and Latin America and Asia. If you could somehow marry the microenterprise concept to setting the infrastructure of the Internet out there, I do think it's quite possible that you could skip a generation in economic development in a way that would reinforce rather than undermine the environment. [The question-and-answer portion of the evening continued.]”