Perspectives: Dare Mighty Things

Public Policy

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By: Alex Dehgan, former Science Advisor to Administrator of USAID.

Dear Colleagues,

December 13th will be my last day as the Chief Scientist for US Agency for International Development, and the end of nearly ten years of service of applying science in furtherance of US foreign policy and foreign assistance.  This has included transforming development at USAID, helping build the first national park in Afghanistan (through the Wildlife Conservation Society), engaging Iran through science diplomacy, using science to rebuild Iraq, and empowering the world through science, technology, and innovation.  It has been an honor and a privilege to serve.

I apologize about the length of this note, but I wanted to share some impressions from the last four years.  As the Agency’s first dedicated chief scientist in more than 2 decades, my focus has been to restore science to its rightful place. Like nearly everything I have accomplished during my lifetime, I did not achieve these goals alone, but with the help of so many of you who are now reading this letter – thank you.  And thanks to the tremendous work of my colleagues at USAID and the State Department, particularly my office’s brilliant and enthusiastic team of scientists, engineers, and development professionals, and our partner scientists, innovators, and entrepreneurs in our universities, federal sciences agencies, NGOs, foundations, and tech firms, we have done big things.

Through our work at USAID, we have restored the AAAS Science Policy Fellowship Program from an incoming class of 2 fellows to nearly 65 fellows per year, including 15 placed overseas in Missions in a restored overseas program.  USAID now has the most AAAS Fellows of any executive branch agency in the 40-year history of the fellowship.  These scientists, engineers, and physicians are transforming how the Agency does business and reconnecting it with the larger global scientific community. The Agency again has data scientists, a GeoCenter, and the first Geographer in the Agency’s history, improving our ability to understand problems and their constraints, apply foresight analysis, and radically increase our Agency’s transparency.

We have created and launched five Grand Challenges for Development (Saving Lives@ Birth, All Children Reading, Powering Agriculture, Making All Voices Count, Securing Water for Food), as well as multiple prizes on atrocity prevention, and counter-trafficking in persons, with more under development.  These programs shifted our focus from whether we have the right solution, to whether we were asking the right questions.  Through our approach to “open source development”, we crowd-sourced the world for the best ideas, and incentivized new innovations that have repeatedly won national and global recognition.  This has generated stunning new innovations from sectors we never would have traditionally approached.  More importantly, nearly half of the ideas are now coming from the developing world, recognizing that talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not.  Funding these innovators and innovations won’t be enough, but we need to build the bridges that elevate the best ideas to scale.

We sought to change how academia engages with development.  The Higher Education Solutions Network (HESN) – a collection of some of the best and brightest institutions and scientific minds in the US and elsewhere – was created not only to change how USAID engages universities, but also to change academia itself.  For universities to be relevant in a world filled with global challenges, we needed to incentivize them to switch from an approach/framework focused on disciplines to one focused on problems.  Through USAID’s development labs, we have created platforms that can co-design, and co-solve problems along with the Agency, and encourage the incubation of new innovations to transition to scale.  Simultaneously, we launched a new fellowship program to engage young American scientists, engineers, and innovators in development.

We have sought to leverage the playing field for those in the developing world to attack the global challenges with us.  In the last four years, we have built extraordinary collaborations with NSF and NIH – which partner American scientists with developing country scientists, and expand the bilateral S&T fund model globally to 90 countries around the world.  This has included some of our most pressing foreign policy concerns, including Libya, Burma, and Pakistan.  We have provided scientific journal access for tens of thousands of Africans, and are starting to equip labs across Africa.  And most importantly, we have been solving development problems, and are starting to see our efforts scale.

Finally, we championed scientific and technical excellence in the Agency.  We drafted the Agency’s first scientific integrity policy that serves a bill of rights for scientists and technical experts, created new or expanded authorities for science, technology, and innovation, expanded access to scientific & technical journals for the Agency, and developed new career opportunities for those with technical skills and backgrounds. We fought for the rights of the Agency’s technical professionals to build their technical skills.  We will soon have a research policy that will help improve Agency standards for the conduct of research as we seek to stand among our peer technical agencies.  More importantly, we expanded the space for creativity and innovation in the Agency by others who are also doing great things.

To achieve these goals, we built an army of intrapreneurs focused on science, technology, and innovation, created a robust independent office of science and technology – again the first in two decades – and have attained significant new resources and expertise for science and technologies to improve the efficacy, speed, sustainability and cost of our development interventions.  To date, the Office of Science and Technology has leveraged more than half a billion dollars, and built new partnerships with other donors, development institutions, foundations, federal agencies, and universities that greatly expand the reach of our efforts.  Soon, depending on congressional approval, we will create a new institution devoted to building the ecosystem that brings together science, technology, innovation, and partnership. All of this started from a cubicle on the 3rd floor.

Science and technology is not new for development.  The power of oral rehydration salts, vaccines, and improved crop varieties and inputs has saved millions of lives.  Agency has a rich history of science and technology, and is populated by many outstanding scientists, engineers, physicians, and brilliant innovators.  President Truman in his Point Four Inaugural Address, made the case for foreign assistance through a new Technical Cooperation Agency.  He saw that foreign assistance was based on science and technology, providing:  The United States is pre-eminent among nations in the development of industrial and scientific techniques. The material resources which we can afford to use for assistance of other peoples are limited. But our imponderable resources in technical knowledge are constantly growing and are inexhaustible.”  Science, technology, and innovation are our comparative advantage as a country, it is what we are respected for globally, and we should take full advantage.

However this work is far from done.  It can be reversed.  It can be forgotten by the tyranny of the daily demands of the present.  I could be not only the first dedicated Chief Scientist in two decades, but also the Agency’s last for the next two.  The Agency needs the scientific & innovation community to keep pushing for the transformations we have set into motion, to exceed the limits of our elasticity against change.  This is not only important for the US, but for the world.  Development is fundamentally changing, and the development community must adapt to those changes for its own survival, but more importantly, to have impact and value for our constituents.  I have always recognized that science is necessary, but not sufficient, that science, technology, innovation, and partnership can’t solve every problem we face, but new tools can change the reality of what is possible.

This requires us, the development community, to take risks.  Our inability to take the risks necessary to create transformative novel solutions can, in itself, result in missed opportunities to save and improve lives.  We choose to hide failure and only focus on success, when in fact we need to validate our failure, measure it, learn from it, to overcome it, and then improve our products and interventions. The greater risk is continuing down the same pathways but expecting different results.  It is our duty to ensure that we are pushing the limits, that we are uncomfortable with the status quo, that we are making every effort to improve the efficacy, speed, and scale of our efforts, and that rigorous evidence & measurement underlie this.

The challenges faced by the developing world also provide those nations with their greatest opportunity.  These countries don’t need to repeat the last 200 years of industrialization: they can “leapfrog” the past to build systems of the future.  This requires rethinking fundamental assumptions:  Are their alternatives for food security beyond growing plants in soil?  Do we need brick and mortar hospitals and expensive equipment to deliver world-class healthcare?  The democratization of science and technology can help us deliver more services with less costly infrastructure.   We can use mobile platforms, online curricula, open source journals, and digital libraries to provide scalable, more tailored, interactive and data-rich approaches to education everywhere to everyone.  By using nanosatellites, connected technologies, and new sensors, we can uncover whether governments are pillaging natural resources, committing atrocities, or changing the environment. We can increase transparency and empower citizens in closed societies that have no voice. The possibilities are limitless.

Ultimately, development is not about assistance, but about opportunity.  Like science, development is an optimistic discipline by necessity.  Powered by ingenuity and technology, and with the collaboration of all nations, we will successfully take on the challenges of hunger, energy, environment, and health. The challenges faced by the developing world are not theirs alone, but in a globalized world, they will affect all nations.

Dare Mighty Things.

Alex Dehgan

Chief Scientist, and Director, 
Office of Science & Technology.

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