Following up on Cairo: The Entrepreneurship Summit

Obama delivered his opening remarks yesterday evening, and they consisted mostly of the usual pablum and shout-outs, though since it's Obama doing the talking, the speech could've been a recitation of Webster's dictionary and still been well-received. Obama referred to entrepreneurship as the "most powerful force the world has ever known for creating opportunity and lifting people out of poverty" and highlighted the concept of microfinance and one of its major proponents, Medal-of-Freedom-winner Mohammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh.

Today, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took the stage to announce the "Partners for a New Beginning" (taking off the title of Obama's speech), which she described as "a group of eminent Americans who have answered the President's call to join our outreach to Muslim communities around the world." Madeleine Albright, Walter Isaacson and Muhtar Kent, the chairman and CEO of Coca-Cola, will lead the new group. It's tough to find much interesting stuff in the remarks delivered by the foursome aside from an apparently strong, shared love of Coke (which is, according to Coke, the third largest employer and the fifth largest investor in Palestine.)

More newsworthy were some new initiatives rolled out by the U.S. Agency for International Development. There were apparently 13, though the official USAID press release I found only details four: a $250 million Middle East and North Africa Investment Fund run through Qatar's Silatech and backed by a U.S. credit guarantee; a World Bank effort to benchmark business reform in 15 unnamed countries; a Cisco entrepreneurship training program in 10 countries; and a new project with the Rockefeller Foundation, Deloitte, Prudential and other groups to create a new investment-ratings system that will measure the "social and environmental performance" of businesses.

The summit got a pretty good review from economics blogger Tim Kane, a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation (Kane's a delegate to the summit and the foundation is an official partner in the event). Kane was impressed that the administration rolled out its "first-string" for the summit and though he thought the discussions had so far been lacking in "nuts and bolts," to Kane that's beside the point, since most people would rather be networking anyway. (On a side note, Kane says that multiple delegates were predicting pro-market reforms in Syria, of all places.)

By the way, conspicuously absent from the list of countries invited to the summit: Iran. After all, we know there's no vibrant middle class or young, tech-savvy culture just waiting to flourish in that backwater... right?