"Last year in Mumbai, I visited a shop owned and operated by women selling crafts and textiles, most of whom come from the very lowest socio-economic stratum, all of whom are organised through one of the most effective women's organisations in the world, Self-Employed Women's Association known as SEWA," Clinton said.
"I've worked with SEWA for many years. I have literally seen the transformation in lives that banding together has catalysed in individual women's lives," Clinton said in her remarks at the 12th Annual Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in Washington.
"I also, last summer, went back to Cape Town, and for the third time, I visited a group of women who, on their own, transformed their position as squatters into homeowners and then community leaders.
I'd already been to one of the housing developments that these women through their own sweat equity had created, and this time I went to the second housing development that they are starting," she said.
"The women that I have come to know don’t have much education, but they are among the most powerful and effective women I have ever met. And they have created now two thriving communities where before there was apathy if not despair," Clinton said.
"I’ve been all over the world talking to women who have overcome odds that even I find daunting, thinking about coming from oppression and repression, coming to stand against family members who want to keep you down, government officials, and other threats," she said.
"When I was in the Democratic Republic of Congo last summer, I met some of the most extraordinary women I’ve ever seen anywhere in the world, women who themselves had been brutally attacked and assaulted, left for dead, but who refused to die, and who are now part of a healing community," she said.
"I also have talked with a number of women who are making their own entrepreneurial mark on the world, from Jerusalem to Islamabad, meeting women who are taking the tool of microenterprise and turning it into better lives for themselves and creating supportive communities," Clinton said.
"In our National Security Strategy and in our recently issued Presidential Directive on Development, we have placed economic growth, inclusive prosperity, and further economic opportunity at the core of what we are attempting to do."
"We believe, and it's something that is borne out, of course, by our own experience, that helping countries cut through red tape and bureaucracy make starting a business and doing business easier," she said, adding empowering women to participate in the economy, in the formal economy, are some of the best investments that one can make.
SEWA, registered in 1972, is an organisation of poor, self-employed women workers.