Shah Sworn In as 16th USAID Administrator
FrontLines - December-January 2009-10
By Ben Barber
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USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah signs a document during his
swearing-in ceremony Jan. 7. In the background: Secretary of
State Hillary Rodham Clinton; Shah's wife, Shivam; son, Sajan;
and daughter, Amna.
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On Jan. 7, Secretary of State
Hillary Rodham Clinton swore
in Dr. Rajiv Shah as the 16th
administrator of the U.S. Agency
of International Development.
As his small daughter Amna
tugged at the family bible held
by his wife Shivam, Shah took
over the leadership of the
Agency, directing 8,000 people
and close to $20 billion in the
current year, comprising the
world’s largest national foreign
aid program.
Nearly 1,000 people attended
the ceremony, including Agency
staff; leaders from the White
House, the Departments of State,
Defense, and Agriculture; and
representatives from the Millennium
Challenge Corporation, Capitol Hill, implementing partners,
the diplomatic corps, former
USAID administrators, and
other dignitaries.
Clinton said the Agency now
had “a visionary development
expert at the helm” and his job would be to “rebuild USAID as the premier development agency in the world” and reverse years of staff cuts.
“Development is my passion,” said Shah, 36, a medical doctor by training. Previously, he served as under secretary for research, education, and economics and as chief scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. There, he launched the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, a new scientific institute that elevated the status and funding of agricultural research to be more in line with other major scientific groups. He also produced initiatives in bioenergy, climate, global food security, childhood obesity, and food safety.
Prior to joining the Obama administration, Shah served as director of agricultural development at the Bill & Melina Gates Foundation, where he helped develop and launch the Global Development Program. In his seven years with the foundation, he also served as the program’s director of strategic opportunities and as deputy director of policy and finance. In these roles, he helped create the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa and the International Finance Facility for Immunization—an effort that raised more than $5 billion for child immunization.
Shah noted that the number of hungry in the world has grown to 1 billion and climate change threatens many poor nations, but that the world now has the technology, expertise, commitment, and political will to meet those challenges.
“Now is the time,” he said, “for us to step up and deliver against the ambitious goals the president and secretary have set for us: to improve lives and fight poverty; to expand human rights and economic opportunities; to build democratic institutions and improve governance; and, in the process, to advance U.S. foreign policy to enhance our own prosperity and security.”
But in order to win U.S. public support for funds to fight poverty, build democracy and governance, and advance U.S. security and prosperity—especially during tough economic times—USAID must show that every dollar spent produces results.
“People want to support development work—they just want to know we can do it effectively,” said Shah.
He vowed to focus on issues already noted by Clinton the previous day in a policy speech at the Petersen Institute for International Economics in Washington: women; agriculture; and building “local capacity” so developing nations’ own experts could eventually lead the fight on poverty—and foreign aid would no longer be needed.
In the audience were former USAID administrators Peter McPherson, Andrew Natsios, and Henrietta Fore; Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack; and Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.).
At his confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Dec. 1, 2009, Shah said: “USAID’s motto, ‘From the American people,’ represents our effort to project the hopefulness and aspiration of the American dream to the farthest corners of the globe.”
“I remember seeing the power of that American ideal at work in a remote village in rural South India,” he said. “I served as a volunteer in a poor tribal community before medical school, and I was struck by the one-room schoolhouse where children who didn’t speak our language or enjoy our freedoms from hunger or disease could look up at the wall and admire photographs of their heroes—Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and President John F. Kennedy.”
Since 2001, development aid increasingly has been linked to U.S. national security, and government officials have backed up calls for rebuilding USAID with the financial resources to make that happen.
Shah told senators he would ensure “that the development voice is heard in every major decision with respect to our foreign policy.” He noted that he will report directly to the secretary of state, who had already expressed her conviction that development, along with diplomacy and defense, serves as a pillar of American foreign policy.
He also said that military-run aid programs recently launched in Afghanistan and Iraq may have large budgets but are no substitute for civilian-run USAID programs. “Knowing how to search for and support local partners—and build local capacity in a way that’s sustainable—are all things that development professionals
have learned over decades of efforts and decades of successes and decades of failures,” he said.
Shah said that USAID is providing one-third of the 1,000 civilian positions in Afghanistan and is hiring 1,000 new Foreign Service Officers under the Development Leadership Initiative.
He noted that two ongoing studies of foreign assistance: the Presidential Study Directive on Global Development (PSD-7), led by the White House, and the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR), led by the State Department, are working to define and make decisions on foreign aid structures. “I don’t want to prejudge the structural outcomes or recommendations of those processes,” said Shah, who serves as a co-chair of the QDDR.
Shah also said USAID needs to do a better job of telling the public about aid successes. And, he said that monitoring and evaluation systems should be part of programs from the beginning of implementation and design.
★
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