Hi, my name is Daphne Koller, and I’m the co-founder and president of Coursera. Coursera  is a company that works with this world’s best academic institutions and universities, in order to take the kind of educational experience that had been available only to a tiny handful of people who are fortunate enough to enroll in these institutions and make it available to everyone around the world for free. We believe education is the great empowerer of people to achieve access to a better life, and we’re privileged to be able to work with some of those great universities to make that available to everyone, everywhere, anytime.   

I think the PAGE initiative is a remarkable collaboration between some of this country’s best entrepreneurs and the U.S. government, and the U.S government provides us with a platform to get some of the ideas that have made us and other entrepreneurs here in the United States here successful and provide it to people all around the world. We all know that entrepreneurship is the basis for prosperity. It’s the basis for stability. It’s what’s going to allow people everywhere to have the kind of opportunities that we here in the United States take for granted, and I’m really excited to be working with some of the best people in this area to make that available to everyone.  

What we would love to do is work with you, work with PAGE in order to create a curriculum that teaches people how to be entrepreneurs, how to be successful both in creating and scaling up a business. We’ve had tremendous success stories even with the courses that are currently available in Coursera. So one example is this woman from Bangladesh who started a bakery, didn’t really know how to get it done, she was escaping from being sold effectively into indentured servitude by her parents, and she took a bunch of courses, learned how to build a sustainable business and is now able to sustain not only herself but seven other women who also escaped from a similar life by virtue of having access to this kind of educational content and how to be a successful entrepreneur. I think that kind of content can teach people all over the world how to become empowered in creating their own business and building a better life for themselves, for their families, for their communities, and ultimately contribute to the overall welfare in the world.