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- 05/12/12: Commencement Address by Dr. Rajiv Shah, USAID Administrator, at the School of International Service, American University
- 05/11/12: Baccalaureate Address by Dr. Rajiv Shah, USAID Administrator, at Tuskegee University
- 05/08/12: Remarks by Nancy Lindborg, Assistant Administrator, Bureau for Democracy, Conflict & Humanitarian Assistance, at the International Food Aid and Development Conference - The Role of U.S. Food Assistance in Building Resilience
- 04/30/12: Remarks by Donald K. Steinberg, Deputy Administrator, at the Interaction Forum 2012 - The Democratization of Development
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This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
Andrew S. Natsios
Administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development
Historically Black Colleges and Universities and the Africa Education Initiative
HBCU Conference
September 15, 2003
I do want to thank you Dr. Klein and Dr. Suber for your leadership here. It's a pleasure to be here today for me. I also want to thank whoever designed the order of this program so the hors d'oeuvres came before my speech, because now you will be able to stay much longer for the speech by me -- the hour and a half lecture I that I have planned can be much more tolerable. That is a joke -- it's not an hour and a half.
I want to tell you a story about when I started as Administrator. I had actually not known Colin Powell. I was only a lieutenant colonel (in the reserves) and he was a four-star general when I was on duty at the Pentagon. This was after my service in the first Bush Administration at AID. After he left office, I went on active duty at the Pentagon and I was in a couple briefings. But he didn't know who I was. He knew I was there.
And, so, when I did my interview with him to take... [inaudible] he is my boss, along with the President, of course.
I went to see him in early 2001 and I said: "Mr. Secretary, I'm an Africanist. You have a deep interest in Africa. The African budget has been paralyzed for 18 years at about the same level. If you take inflation, there's been a decline. It's about $790 million," I said. "That's really not acceptable."
And he said: "You're absolutely right, Andrew." And I said: "We are going to increase it. You and I need to convince the President." It took about five minutes, and he said, "Do it."
It (the budget) is now this year, this fiscal year, which is now ending, $1,060,000,000. So, it's gone up 35 percent in two years. And it'll go up again next year.
And that's not humanitarian assistance. That's the development budget. The humanitarian assistance budget's separate -- that's going up, too. Actually, we hope that declines because that's for countries that have emergencies.
Ethiopia, for example, has a major famine and USAID is shipping a million tons of food, the most food we shipped to any country in about 35 years, because the need is so great and the Ethiopians have asked us for help.
I just want to make a few quick points tonight so that you can finish this wonderful -- I actually tried all the hors d'oeuvres before any of you arrived and I think you'll really want to go back to them, rather than hearing me.
But the first point, I want to make tonight is that several historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have just won awards to start working with us on the President's Africa Education Initiative. The AEI is a very solid, hands-on program that I think is going to be very effective: developing children's textbooks and working with African ministries of education, local NGOs and universities to train basic education teachers.
We have, for example, partnered American universities like yours with universities like Makerere University in Uganda, which is like one of the Harvards, one of the Ivy League schools of Africa, a superb institution. But the more connections we have, the more it enriches both of our universities and colleges.
As the President said in June 2002, when he announced the textbook program and doubled the funding for AEI: "Education is the foundation of development and democracy in every culture and every continent."
It is a fact that education has played a critical role at each and every stage of our development as a nation and a democracy. I, of course, come from Massachusetts, and you may have heard of the Horace Mann High Schools. I'm a very strong follower of the theories of Horace Mann, who was a great federalist and Commissioner of Education in Massachusetts in the 1830s. It was he who established the first laws in the free United States, in the post-war United States, to have universal public education in the State of Massachusetts.
One of AID's critical missions, perhaps our most important long-term goal, is to carry this commitment to education forward, just as the President said, to every culture and every continent. Science, free markets, education, growth, rule of law: these are all foundations of democracy and development. And a growing number of HBCUs have been our partners in this effort.
We now have 45 HBCU partnerships in 24 countries around the world: Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Near East. We work together in agriculture -- one of my obsessions is agriculture - as well as basic education, health, trade, democracy, information technology, and the environment.
That is why I am here today, to thank you for the quality of the work your institutions are performing in the developing world and in transition countries.
A young student, in 1948, from Morehouse College, wrote an essay called "The Purpose of Education." Of course his name was Martin Luther King, Jr. The essay was brief, but it struck a deep chord and I want to quote what he said.
"Education has a two-fold function to perform in the life of man in society: One is utility and the other is culture. You must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character--that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives on which to concentrate."
USAID's mission -- to reduce poverty and improve the lives of people throughout the world -- is a worthy objective, worthy of the high standards that Dr. King espoused in his life. The work can be hard, though, very hard, and we are fortunate when we can find partners who can help us make a genuine difference in peoples' lives.
It is now my privilege to present ten HBCUs with partnership certificates. This is the first time these ten have served as lead institutions in AID-funded programs and they are warmly commended for it. It shows, I think, what should happen when intelligence is matched with character. And I think in all [inaudible], you have character, not just people.
Thank you for the chance for me to speak with you tonight. Now, let me make these awards.
Will the presidents or the representatives please come forward, as I call their names. Alabama A&M University; Albany State University; Dillard University; Elizabeth City State University; Fisk University; Huston-Tillotson College; Jackson State University; Morgan State University; St. Augustine's College; and Winston-Salem State University.
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