SECRETARY CLINTON: Thank you very, very much, Minister. And it is a great personal pleasure for me to be back here in Bangladesh after too many years away. I am very grateful to the foreign minister for her warm and gracious welcome and the substantive conversations that we just concluded, and I am looking forward to seeing the prime minister to continue those discussions.

I am sorry that I missed the festivities for Bengali New Year. I know you put on quite a colorful celebration here in Dhaka. And I hope this will be a very successful, positive year for progress, peace, and prosperity for Bangladesh and for the friendship between our countries. That friendship goes back decades, and it is rooted in our shared democratic values, our strong economic ties, and our deep people-to-people connections.

Today, we are working together to help solve some of Bangladesh’s most pressing challenges, from disaster response to healthcare, from food security to climate change. Bangladesh represents one of the largest development assistance commitments that the Obama Administration has made. MORE