May I now call on Her Majesty, Queen Rania of the Hashemite Kingdom
of Jordan to address us, and, Your Majesty,
I would like to express our gratitude to you because as a member
of the foundation board of the World Economic Forum
and particularly as a way distinctive person in our Young Global Leaders’ efforts.
I think you always have been a shining model
of engagement in order to improve the state of the world.
and I think everybody appreciates, particularly,
your commitment to social affairs and here I would like to mention
and you actually have been a member of our Global Council on Education.
So ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Her Majesty Queen Rania.
In the name of god the almighty,
Your Highness Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, Mr. Klaus Schwab,
my colleagues in this humanitarian work, ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon.
Prayers be upon you.
It’s an honor for me for the change and -- the change, the venue change,
is an Arab country in Qatar since it is an opportunity for the whole world
countries to hold themselves accountable in solving the issue then problems
that affect the whole humanity.
It’s also our responsibility as Arabs to take part in international forum
and to give our input in a near Paris that witnesses ongoing changes.
I would like to thank the leadership of the state of Qatar for exhibition
and for giving sponsorship to the World Economic Forum
and for hosting this international summit.
would be here if it weren’t for your vision and leadership.
Your ability to mobilize not just people but the best in people has pulled together
possibly the largest and most talented collection of experts the world has ever seen,
a group able to draw on a wide reservoir of thought and perspective,
exactly what we need to get the job done.
Someone once said justice is the conscience of humanity.
When I look at the world today, I fear we aren’t listening to our conscience
because I don’t see justice.
I see Mohammad, an 80 year old herdsman from Somalia who lost his entire livestock
and livelihood to climate change.
I see Davley, a seven year old Indian girl who carry sharp,
heavy stones for 20 hours a day ever since she could walk.
I see Franka, a 32 year old from Florida, university educated,
forced into joblessness and homelessness and poverty by the financial crisis.
Now, multiply these stories by hundreds of millions because that’s how many people
are suffering from extreme weather, child labor,
and so many other crisis where the burden falls upon the innocent.
Mohammad, Davley, and Franka are found on every continent.
Their names differ but their stories are the same,
human suffering, our humanity suffering.
This glaring injustice, inequality, imbalance dominates our world.
It pushes us to a place where international deadlock is the norm,
where cynicism and mistrust are common currency.
It builds a society around erroneous assumptions that tell us
if just enough people are happy, then there’s no need to change it,
but just enough isn’t good enough for everyday this continues billions
of people are at risk from poverty, disease, conflict, and climate change.
Permanent scars are left on the minds and bodies of our children.
Irreversible damage is done to the air, land, and seas of our grandchildren.
and let me be clear.
When all countries left untouched by the inequality of the international system,
developed countries suffered nearly half of all global job losses,
yet they make up less than a fifth of the global workforce.
So, let me ask you this.
What does it say about our humanity when
we let nine million children die every year before the age of five?
What does it say about our integrity when we break our promises
to put 72 million children into primary school?
What does it say about our morality when we abandon over 600 million girls,
adolescent girls, to poverty and prejudice?
To me it says international injustice is the symptom of a broader crisis,
an international crisis of values.
Because when the bottom line becomes our guiding principle,
we know that financial value prompts human value.
When we live in an unjust system, it becomes just a system,
a system without values. Our world craves values.
This fundamental human instincts like compassion for the vulnerable,
charity, forgiveness, and pricing peace over conflict.
They’re what Kevin McKay calls the currency of grace,
a currency based on the gold standard that every human has value,
that they’re deserving of respect, dignity, and opportunity,
because the only value is human value.
Over the coming days and months, I want you to keep this front
and center because we need these human values to drive the discourse
of the World Economic Forum.
We need well to remember what Warren Buffett refers to
as value investing, where you invest in the undervalued
because you recognize their potential.
Well, right now, we need to start investing in our values.
We need to start investing in the undervalued
like the poor and uneducated and recognize their potential.
and that’s why you’re here, to restore human values,
to restore our conscience, to restore justice to the system
so that our children don’t have to live with
our mistakes or become destined to repeat them.
And that’s why the Global Redesign Initiative is so important.
We need west experience to navigate today’s complex world,
a world so interdependent but a fire in one part burns us all.
We need to step outside our bubble where leadership,
government, and industry reside
and rotate through the proverbial revolving door.
We need to be inclusive and recognize the solutions
must include opinions and ideas from developing countries,
the private sector, NGOs, and youth.
Even when you don’t like what they’re saying you
have to be strong enough to listen, to give voice to the indigenous
and indigent instead of deferring to profit.
And we need to ask the tough question.
Do we really represent others or are we after our own narrow self interest?
Which is why now is the time to rebuild the system.
Now is the time to confront the rising challenges of our age.
The size of our task should not daunt us. The solutions exist.
They’re in the schools of Finland which produce the best students,
the hospitals of Canada which provide the best care,
and the parliament of Rwanda which has the most women.
They’re in the projects of brave NGOs
and the minds of groundbreaking social entrepreneurs.
Our religions tell us we’re only as strong as our weakest link,
that we should respect strength not power.
If we truly want reform, we need the strength
to challenge our definitions of progress and our assumptions about the world.
We need to remind ourselves that economic prosperity in
and of itself is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
So, as we survey the landscape and see extreme poverty, violence,
persecution, and pain, we know that these indicators are
what define our world today and it’s these indicators a new system
should focus on because MDGs are just as important as GDP.
And when we begin to see the world through a different lens,
through human lens, when we start to hold the currency of grace,
believing there should be no economic value with our human value,
we realize that a key indicator of human advancement is education.
How many children are in school?
The quality of education of every child because our schools are incubators
for the world we want to create.
They’re microcosms of the future, of our future,
in the making because it’s in the classroom we’ll beat poverty.
It’s in the classroom we’ll defeat terrorism.
It’s in the classroom we’ll steep our students
and the principles that will save our planet.
Most of all, it’s in the classroom we’ll teach our children
to defend themselves against the misguided, a malicious belief of others.
In the long run only education can bring about a new world order.
Only education can make redesign a truly global initiative.
So your task is not just to rethink, redesign, and rebuild international system,
but to revalue human values, restore them to public life,
and remind the world how much humanity needs them.
So let us listen to our conscience once more.
Let us return justice to humanity. Thank you all very much.