The US State Department's Secretary Hillary Clinton recently presented a speech at a USAID conference on the opportunity that mobile phones provide for economic development, healthcare, government, banking and more. Much of it applies to mobile health in developing markets. (You can watch the full video of the speech here.) Here are some of the relevant excerpts:

"Innovation, science, technology must again become fundamental components of how we conduct development work and the only way we can do that is with your help. We want your ideas, we want your guidance, and we want every so often a prod if we’re not producing what you think we’re capable of producing. I’ve said many times that while talent may be distributed universally, opportunity is not. And the reality of the world we live in today is that technology and innovation are the great equalizers and can be used to create opportunity where there is very little of that commodity.

"Over the last 17 years and particularly in the last year and a half, I’ve seen that happening. I’ve seen it happening in Kenya where farmers have had their incomes grow by as much as 30 percent since they started using mobile banking technology. In Bangladesh where more than 300,000 people, which is just unimaginable – but 300,000 people, Paul, had signed up to learn English on their mobile phones. In Sub-Saharan Africa, women entrepreneurs are using the internet to get microcredit loans. And in many countries, text-based tip lines are providing unprecedented access to expert advice on everything from agriculture to healthcare. And we need to replicate that progress and take it to scale in the lives of the billion people at the bottom of the world’s economic ladder.

"Innovation and technology can do for human development today what the Green Revolution did for agriculture. And we can generate significant yields from very modest inputs. One recent World Bank study showed that in a typical developing country, a 10 percent increase in the penetration rate of mobile phones led to an almost 1 percent increase in per capita GDP. And that’s something, as Megan’s story reminds us, children get right away. They know that there’s opportunity waiting with that mobile phone.

"We’ve had so many of you here as you’ve been talking who are doing really extraordinary work. And we need to recognize that although we won’t have all the answers, we need to act on the best answers we can come up with. We can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We also need to nurture organic and locally produced solutions.

"And here in the government, we are studying the most successful models of mobile banking and working with NGOs, financial institutions, and governments to explore new applications. We’re pushing to expand internet access across the world. In January, I spoke about the freedom to connect when I laid out our internet freedom agenda. And we are committed to standing behind that agenda."

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"So what we hope is that we can develop accountability measures, and I love the idea of using mobile technology to report data back. So it’s not just giving out information; it is a means for acquiring information and doing the analysis that flows from that. We did it before. The Green Revolution is the most cited example for a good reason, because it was USAID-funded discoveries in agriculture that really turned the tide on hunger in so many places and provided support for local farmers. It is also true that as we look at the challenges in development today, we have to constantly be assessing the consequences of what we consider to be development.

"Just a very quick story. All those 5 billion cell phones, well, there are, literally, people in villages in Africa and Asia who have cell phones but don’t have the money to send their own children to school. So now, clearly, they’re willing to pay for the cell phone, but they’re not going to pay the school fees that a society and a government demand. So we have to try to figure how we have a matrix of development needs that are recognized as intersecting and interacting, so that we cannot have more unintended consequences than we should expect to have. And I think that’s the constant question that those of us who are looking at this from a big scale of where we are and where we need to go have to ask ourselves."