President obama thats great. Thank you. [applause] thank you, its an honor to be here. When i was growing up in rwanda, i used to be in the forest collecting firewood for my parents. Other children in africa are facing the same challenges, they are involved in a number of activities to help their parents just to prepare their meal instead of going to school. So as i was growing up, i kept thinking about something that i can do to help these families have access to alternative fuels they can use to replace charcoal wood that they have been using for many years. So i came up with an idea whereby we collect wood and turned turn them into an affordable, environmentally Friendly Product that people can use, its a great cooking fuel which can improve health and sanitation in homes. Its been two years and we have employed more than 25 people, giving them jobs and we are trying to expand to other areas of the country so that we can continue to improve sanitation as well as providing alteshtive fuels which can improve health and mitigate Climate Change in the country and africa in general. President obama excellent. [applause] its an honor to be here. Im so happy. We are a social enterprise, i started it three years ago, we are now in peru, chile and mexico. What we tried to do is go out and find opportunities where other people hadnt. So we looked for women who havent been able to have the education they needed and make them great developer and connect them with job opportunities. Something i notice when students join our program, most are completely unaware of their potential. They come in thinking its going to be really hard to break this vicious cycle of lowskilled employment, underpaid employment or domestic work. But they soon start learning the code and its such a powerful skill set. A few week into the program they Start Building their first website, their first app, their games, and showing them to the world. Its so empowering and six months after joining theyre ready to go out and join the work force. So we have people who get job offers from the Coolest Companies in town they go out, get to decide where they want to go and work, they triple their income so they significantly improve their economic circumstances and support their families and i think most importantly they start realizing that anything is possible if they work hard enough for it. And we have student that was gone from working at a corner shop to working at the i. D. B. In washington as developer a few blocks from the white house. They are an example that anything is possible. Theyre changing not only their lives but their communities, their cities, and i think they are transforming the tech sector in latin america. They are bringing the diversity and the talent that the sector needs to really become a leading force in our economy. And im pretty sure as we continue to grow and reach thousands of women in the region, they are going to change our country for the better and make sure that we can actually base our growth on the most important thing that we have, our young talent. President obama thats great. [applause] we were talking back stage, id been reading about this, and i said 60 of the women who have gone through this program now were employed and i was corrected, its now 70 . I had old day tafment but i think its important to point out that your success rate has been quite extraordinary already. Thats wonderful. Thank you. President obama mark, there was a time when you were sort of in their shoes and but now, obviously facebooks success has been extraordinary. But im sure you still can connect with the stories that are told here and some of the stories out there. How is facebook thinking about its own role in creating this platform for entrepreneurship around the world . I know thats something youve been thinking a lot about. Well, its really inspiring to be here with so many great entrepreneurs and you know, you hear about all the work theyre doing, its an honor system of thanks for having me. You know, to me, entrepreneurship is about creating change, not just creating companies. And you know, the most effective entrepreneurs who ive met care deeply about some mission, some change that theyre trying to create and often they dont even start because theyre trying to create a company. Thats how i think about my connection to all of us here is, i was getting started, i wanted, i cared deeply about giving everyone a voice, and giving people the tools to share everything they cared about. And bringing a Community Together and it started small, in one university, and i didnt think it was going to be a company at the time. As a matter of fact i was pretty convinced that at some point someone would build Something Like this for the world but i thought that that would be some other company that already had thousands of engineers and was used to building stuff for hundreds of millions of people around the world and you know, what ended up happening was, that no one built it. So we just kept on going. People said it each step along the way, you know what youre doing, maybe College Students like it but no one else is going to like it. Theres not going to be any money in doing this. All right, only really do it if you care, if youre passionate about doing it. Then it started grow, people said it would be a fad, never be a good business. But you keep going because you care, not because youre trying to create a business. And then there was the shift to mobile, people thought it wouldnt be a sustainable business. And you know, through each of these things, the entrepreneurs i think build things that last for a long time keep going because they care fundamentally about the change theyre trying to create in the world and theyre not in it just to build a company. And you know, i carry that with me today. So today, we have, we live in a world with more than seven billion people but more than four billion of us are not on the internet. And we talk about having an equal opportunity to be able to create change in the world, i think thats a hard thing to do if you dont have access to some of the basic infrastructure and technical tools that are necessary to build this kind of these kinds of technical products. I kind of think about what were doing today. Very similarly to how i thought about where we are at the beginning. You know, i get people all the time who come to me and say, all right, youre investing billions of dollars in trying to put Internet Connectivity in places where, you know, we dont get paid for it. Its not something that well make any money from for a very long period of time, if it works out. But its a deep belief that youre trying to make a change, trying to connect people in the world and i really do believe if you do something good and if you help people out, then eventually some portion of that good will come back to you. You may not know up front what its going to be but thats just been the guiding principle for me in the work that weve done and i hope that some of the work we do can play a role in empowering you and help manager entrepreneurs to build the next great companies. [applause] president obama so for the three budding entrepreneurs, youve already had some success and positive feedback. But i know its still hard sometimes and frustrating. Lets go back to the earlier question i asked. What do you fine to be some of the biggest hurdles for your success . And are there policies that either your governments could be pursuing or the United States in conjunction with your governments could be pursuing that would really make this process if not easy, then at least a little smoother . And are there questions or concerns that you have in terms of how more established businesses like facebook, how they might be able to interact with startups like yours . So why dont we well go in reverse order this time. I think theres been many challenges along the way and in our case, we tried to disrupt many preconceptions. People were like, how are you going to train them, how will you get a young woman who went to a Public High School who isnt very good, to be competitive in the labor market. I think weve overcome those and weve proved that you can learn in months instead of years. Most of the companies that hire our developers actually rehire, you know. So they realize that theyre great, you know. Theyre as competitive as anyone else who comes from a different background. Thats been very, very encouraging and on our way. And i mean, the little secret that i have, being an entrepreneur, motivation is everything. When we are making the end of the month to pay all our people, when were facing challenges, i just go into the classroom. Ok, let me go into the classroom, i talk to the girls that study with us. Theyre the main force behind not only myself but all my team my partners and all my team because they are fighting so hard to make it happen. They are sometimes committing four hours a day to come and go back. They have on top of studies, they have significant responsibilities and are move proving it can be done. Thats a reality check to say, i have everything i need to keep going at this. [applause] i think one of the most Biggest Challenges that i have faced was because i started this company very young. At the time i was 19 years old and in my culture, it is believed that those great initiatives are started by old people. Its been and those things that have been difficult for old people cannot be possible for young people. So i tried to disrupt that idea and i created this company, but of course during that period no one was even trusting me to be my employee. I had to be my own marker. I had to be everything in the company, so i i can build that kind of First Impression so i can impress a few people to come to me and help me run this, and the other challenge we are facing is a lot of Financial Institutions didnt even know what we were talking about because this is these are the kind of Renewable Energy we wanted to bring in, and you find folks working in banks asking you, what are you trying to do, because they dont understand what we are doing. It was very difficult for them to analyze and calculate the risk that might be involved in the activities that we are tiing to do. But because i trusted in my solution and this kind of thing i want to do for my community i kept pushing, applying for different competitions and lucky the United StatesAfrica Foundation grant to start to start the initiative and when i started, people started to see how you can take advantage in ways that you already have to produce some product which is can then go back in communities and be a solution which can improve lives of many people and then from there, people started coming. But the lesson that i learned from that experience is that no matter what youre trying to do, its necessary that you are having the kind of motive in your mind that you want society to move forward system of the policies come along the way to help you run the initiative but that will happen once you start. If you dont start, no one will come and join you. President obama good. So \[applause] president obama part of what the two of you described is, first of all, each country has its own culture and theres going to be sometimes some cultural barrier, whether its attitudes about women and what they can do, or attitudes about young people and how seriously they take a young person. Mark had to deal with that a little bit. But here obviously in the United States and particularly in silicon valley, i think thats begun to change. But theres also just basic issues like financing. And having access to capital. Particularly when its a new idea and it doesnt fit the existing models that the banks or other Financial Institutions may have. Mia, do those challenges resonate in your experience . How did you navigate through those . I think all the entrepreneurs like everybody where in the world we share the same challenges. I think i made almost every single mistake you read about in every book. I learned everything the hard way. So yeah, its a learning process. Its funding was one of the challenges of course. The other one was the legal system and the legal structure especially in egypt. Its not startup friendly. You have to do you have to be persistent to get around that. Building a team as well, like, im a woman and i started, i was young president obama youre still young, i think. I think you qualify as young. So, yeah, i had almost the same challenges. Id say the only thick that keep us going is believing in our idea, believing that we can do something. We can add value to peoples lyes. And this is the only thing that keeps me getting up every day in the morning and going to work. President obama all of you are expressing what mark said which is, it starts with a passion. If you start off just saying i want to make money, but theres no Clear Mission behind it, then when you start hitting some of these barriers its hard to push through. With respect to some of the barriers that youre talking about, the u. S. , in keck to the entrepreneurship summit, what weve been trying to do is take best practices and learn lessons about whats working and whats not. And so in the grants were providing or the training that were providing, you know, while these what these summits have been useful in doing is hearing directly from entrepreneurs and say this program doesnt work as well as it could. This one work really well. What were also trying to do, though, is encourage governments to listen and hear from entrepreneurs to build a different kind of culture. So the point you made about how hard is it to get a business started . How much paperwork do you have to fill out . What kind of fees do you have to pay . How much bureaucracy do you have to sort through . Thats something that here in the United States weve had to deal with ourselves. What weve tried to do is both simplify processes but also use technology in ways that means you dont have to travel across town in cairo to go to an office and the person you need to see isnt there and then you have to travel back and reschedule the next day and the traffic is terrible and its driving you crazy. If you can go on the net and do a lot of that work ahead of time, that can make a huge difference in accelerating the process that youre doing. So im very glad that we have 20 countries represented here because part of what were doing is getting commit. Those other countries to say, were going to learn from each other and figure out how we can streamline these efforts so that were making life a little bit easier for young people like you. Yeah, actually, when we started, we didnt know where to start from. We couldnt find any information online, for example, on how to get the Company Registered in egypt. We didnt know any lawyers or anyone who can direct us through it. So we have to go and ask for help from other people and couldnt find any information. So much time, effort, and money. President obama even here in the United States where its much easier to do business we still have 16 agencies that have in charge of doing business. We tried to streamline into one, it requires congressional action. [laughter] so at least what we tried to do so at least what we tried to do is consolidate the websites so its easier to get the information even though you still have to deal pork ten rblely with 16 different agencies for different needs. So there are specific things that the government can do to be more entrepreneur friendly. How can Companies Like facebook, or google or some of the venture funds that are represented here, how should they think about finding good ideas, what sorts of mentorship or training would you find most helpful . Obviously having experienced entrepreneurs, people who have seen startups in the past, can maybe help you avoid a few of the lessons and part of the goal of the summit here is to build networks so that that kind of mentorship is available. But marking i know that facebook is already doing some of this. Tell us about some of the things youre excited about and then maybe we can hear from them about other Networking Opportunities that theyd be looking for. Sure. We have a dwooper program all over the world where, you know, we go around and its called fb start, and we give entrepreneurs free access to tools and send them a lot of tools that people can use are free from facebook and other places, but in order to help get started with businesses, we give to Different Companies tens of thousands of dollars worth of facebook tools to get started. But its also important to help people learn thousand use the tools. So we do entrepreneurship workshops around the world. People are starting to create technical companies, but also for Small Businesses. Which i think are an important part, maybe less the focus of this summit but thats a huge part of what we try to do around the world and help people get on the internet and connect with people that theyre trying to sell their products to. We have more than 50 million Small Business pages that are on facebook and a large number of them use it as they primary presence for communicating with people and attracting help. Thats a pretty good basic tool thats out there. The biggest thing that im personally focused on is connectivity, though. I think for you guy, we talked about this a little bit back stage, i think youre mostly in places that have reasonable connectivity. You were talking about how sometimes when you go home its not so good. But in general, i think, for a whole other big population wave of folks, this is a blacking factor. If you grew up and youve never used a computer or never had access to the internet, its often hard to even imagine what youre missing out on. So and this is a local problem that i think we, you know, need to do a better job of empowering folks in Different Countries to be able to spread connectivity. This isnt something that the u. S. Or some American Company can come in and do in the pace and do. In the places its worked, its been in partnership with local companies, local entrepreneurs and local governments. Thats also something i