Dr. Rajiv Shah serves as the 16th Administrator of USAID and leads the efforts of more than 9,600 professionals in 80 missions around the world.
Since being sworn in on Dec. 31, 2009, Shah managed the U.S. Government's response to the devastating 2010 earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti; co-chaired the State Department's first review of American diplomacy and development operations; and now spearheads President Barack Obama's landmark Feed the Future food security initiative. He is also leading “USAID Forward,” an extensive set of reforms to USAID's business model focusing on seven key areas, including procurement, science & technology, and monitoring & evaluation.
Before becoming USAID's Administrator, Shah served as undersecretary for research, education and economics, and as chief scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. At USDA, he launched the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which significantly elevated the status and funding of agricultural research.
Prior to joining the Obama administration, Shah served for seven years with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, including as director of agricultural development in the Global Development Program, and as director of strategic opportunities.
Originally from Detroit, Shah earned his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School and his master's in health economics from the Wharton School of Business. He attended the London School of Economics and is a graduate of the University of Michigan.
Shah is married to Shivam Mallick Shah and is the father of three children. He lives in Washington, D.C.
We need to help raise voices of all citizens—and empower their governments to respond. That’s the spirit behind today’s launch—to build on President Obama’s call for open government and inspire a global movement to end corruption and strengthen accountability. This Grand Challenge calls on the world’s brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and engineers to design breakthrough technologies and approaches to make all voices count. In fact, we’ve already seen some cutting-edge examples at work around the world.
We know we cannot prevent droughts or floods, but we can work much harder and more strategically to ensure these shocks don’t devastate families or set back hard-won development gains. That is the goal behind today’s launch of our Agency’s first-ever Policy and Program Guidance on Building Resilience to Recurrent Crisis. With this policy, we take a step forward in essentially delivering results for the most vulnerable communities around the world.
I’m delighted to participate in today’s launch of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s first policy on Youth in Development. At its core, this policy is about making youth around the world an important priority in the decisions and implementation of our work. Last year, the global population of youth surpassed seven billion people, more than half of whom are under the age of 30. A large majority – nearly 90 percent – live in the developing world. Whether we are raising awareness about HIV/AIDS, building roads, or expanding access to financing for entrepreneurs, the support and engagement of young people is necessary for long-term, sustainable development.
This pragmatic, even utilitarian approach toward LGBT issues guides the work of my agency, the U.S. Agency for International Development. Our development assistance will never be fully effective unless we draw on the full contributions of the entire population, including marginalized groups such as the LGBT community, women, young people, ethnic and religious minorities, people with disabilities, indigenous people, and displaced persons.
For the LGBT community, this means supporting the political, economic and social empowerment of the community. It means protecting LGBT people during periods of conflict or humanitarian emergencies, when they’re most vulnerable. It means mainstreaming these issues into our programs in food security, global health, climate change, economic growth, and democracy and governance. Most of all, it means involving the LGBT community in our partner countries, not just as victims, but as planners, implementers and beneficiaries of our programs under the watchwords, “Nothing about them without them.”
In the last few years, we’ve seen the momentum build and real results begin to emerge—including 8.8 million children reached through nutrition programs, and 1.8 million people who adopted improved technologies or management practices.
And although the genuine impact of our work will only be understood years from now, we have a growing sense today that the world is increasingly better prepared to absorb any shocks and stumbles without seeing families slip into poverty or nations into unrest.
UWC has partnered with USAID in a number of areas, particularly in developing and shaping higher education programs, by making USAID's development programs relevant and responsive to local needs.
I cannot tell you the number of times each week that I and other senior government officials in White House meetings refer to OTI efforts in critical crisis countries, from Haiti to Sri Lanka, from Burma to Yemen, from Kenya to Lebanon. In these situations, OTI is the eyes, the ears, the face and the conscience of our government and frequently the international community as a whole.
Equally important is the effect that the OTI model has had on the rest of the agency and the rest of the U.S. government’s foreign affairs community. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, OTI should feel flattered indeed. We are all seeking to replicate such techniques and practices as rapid deployment, decentralized programming and decision-making, expeditionary mindsets, data-driven strategies, in-situ learning, incorporation of best practices into on-going programs, adoption of sustainability principles from the beginning, and development of co-deployment platforms focusing on a broad multi-disciplinary surge capacity.
SCIP is a public private partnership between USAID, the ELMA Foundation and J.P. Morgan, in conjunction with South African Department of Basic Education, seeking to empower teachers to improve primary grade reading.
Demand for wildlife and wildlife products has dramatically increased in recent years, attracting criminal networks that have made the illicit wildlife economy a global challenge, rivaling trafficking in drugs, persons and weapons. Regrettably, wildlife trafficking can offer greater profits, lower risk of detection, and lower penalties than other illicit trade, and the profits are fueling transnational criminal activities, and even terrorism. At USAID, we believe that wildlife trafficking is not only a security and ethical issue, it is a threat to development. Because of linkages with transnational criminal networks, illicit wildlife trade undermines security and rule of law on which development depends. In regions that depend on wildlife for ecotourism, trafficking costs jobs, reduces incomes, and threatens investment. With 75 percent of emerging infectious diseases originating in wildlife, trafficking is also a global health issue. And we know that drastically reducing populations of keystone species such as elephants and tigers can disrupt delicate ecosystems on which local communities depend.
In order to reach the scale and sustainability required to affect real change—to finally solve intractable problems in development—we have to overcome our remaining challenges and encourage a new era of private sector engagement in development. And all of us—businesses and development agencies—will have to take a new approach.
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Last updated: April 30, 2013
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