Bill Clinton travels the world with purpose

CNT: But no professional group counseled the Clinton Foundation? Are you advised, for example, as the Gates Foundation is, by the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisers?

Clinton: No, no, no, no, nothing like that. But in all fairness, I should know what needs to be done; I've spent a lifetime doing this. When I was president, we gave the first federal assistance ever to micro-credit in America. We set up a community development bank in Los Angeles. We had 95 percent of all the lending ever done under the American community investment act, which requires banks to put money in the areas where they serve and take deposits. We made two million micro-credit loans a year in poor countries all over the world.

Hillary and I both have been interested in a lot of these issues for way over 20 years, and so we had a pretty good knowledge base going in, and I didn't need to be counseled as much on what to do. It was really a question of what do you want to do where you can make an impact, and can you put together and fund a project and staff it properly so you have a reasonable chance of success? And if it doesn't work, at least you know it didn't work because of factors other than not making sufficient effort. That's the test we have to apply every time we're asked to do something, because there's a lot of stuff we're asked to do that we can't.

And then sometimes I just go help other people, because they're doing stuff that I really believe in. And I try to give them a night a year—a fund-raiser—or do something else, just because I believe in what they're doing.

I hope in the years ahead we'll be able to do more of this development work, because it requires you to do health care and education and deal with the energy challenges of climate change and all of this. But basically, if you're going to do a comprehensive development project, you have to not have a big mismatch between your resources and the area you're working in, and you must have the support of the government. Whether they can help you a lot or not, it's impossible to conceive of succeeding if they're not for you. You can't go in unless you get the ground rules clear, unless they really want you.

The same thing is true of AIDS. The biggest thing we've done in terms of the impact on human life by far since I've been out of office is on the AIDS front, because I have over half a million people getting medicine under these contracts. About a third of all the people in the world who have been added to the rolls of anti-retrovirals since 2003, when we started, are getting the medicine off these contracts. And the impact has actually been bigger, because when we cut the price from $500 to $139 for us for adult medicine, and then from $600 to $190 all the way down to $60 for the children's medicine—adult medicine down now about $100—it collapsed the whole price structure for the generic AIDS drugs, so that nearly anybody in the world buying these drugs now can get them within 25 percent of our ceiling price. To be fair, what made that possible is not just our efforts but the availability of more money, because then you can order at higher volumes. Then the manufacturers will take lower margins on each unit because they get much higher volumes and they know they're going to get paid on time, which is a good deal.

CNT: You've described the work of the Clinton Foundation as having business management as its model, and in your speech to the Slate Conference on Philanthropy on November 13, 2006, you spoke enthusiastically about the current trend of narrowing the boundaries between investment and giving. Yet, powerful businesses have often sacrificed the interests of the poor to their own ends. What can be done to safeguard vulnerable communities from exploitation and corporate malpractice?

Clinton: A lot of what has to be done to safeguard them has to be done by the political systems involved. But more and more businesspeople are seeing this as an economic opportunity. You know that book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid? Have you seen that book? I think [the author] is a professor at Michigan or someplace. It's a great book. Mohammed Yunus made money out of the Grameen Bank and won the Nobel Prize because he proved that you could loan money to poor people and they'd pay it back—over 98 percent of them have. So what I try to do, since I'm not in government, is to persuade more people in business that they can do well and do good. And persuade more donors to support me because they think I'm using business practices.

For example, the main contribution we've made to the fight against AIDS is reorganizing the drug market, going from a high-margin, low-volume, uncertain-payment business to a high-volume, low-margin, absolutely certain-payment business. We also run on very low overhead, which donors like. They know we're sort of bleeding-heart cheapskates around here. We don't spend their money if we don't have to, and we try to maximize the dollars that go directly to benefit the cause that they fund, whatever it is.

I believe that there is, in many cases, particularly in this whole energy area—I look at it as a public goods market, clean energy and-energy efficient technologies. Right now, at current oil prices, nearly everything we need to do in the world to combat climate change is already reasonably economical. But the reason you need legislation is to organize and energize the market and focus it, because the old energy economy is highly organized and well capitalized and politically influential, but the new energy economy will pay big dividends if you can just expand it. So since I'm not in government, what I'm working on in this climate-change thing is to try and organize the market. It's a business strategy, really. And to persuade others to do the same thing. You look at Wal-Mart: There's a conservative, big company, not unionized. Just by cutting their packaging five percent between now and 2013 they're going to save their supply chain three and a half billion dollars. It will have the effect of taking off the road 203 diesel-powered trucks that are highly polluting and only get six miles to the gallon. They're selling a hundred million compact fluorescent lightbulbs. If people buy them and screw them in and use them, it'll have the effect of taking 700,000 cars off the road. And it's all good business.

So what I try to do is get businesses and foundations and wealthy donors to give me money because I run in a businesslike fashion. And in turn, to argue that in the private sector, particularly in the energy area, there are business strategies that can be adopted that will involve more poor people. I don't want any of these banks to lose money. I'm trying to get them to give bank accounts to the 28 million poor people who don't have them. I just want them to make money in a different way. And I want to prove that they can do it. So I never ask any business to lose money. I ask them to imagine making it in a different way that will do more social good.

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