Synergy in Development 2005

Thank you very much for that kind introduction and I want to welcome all of you to Washington to the conference. I know that many of you come from the south, from Africa, from Asia, from Latin America, from the Caribbean, and friends and colleagues from Eastern Europe are here as well.

I want to start with a couple of stories. . . My first trip to Africa was in 1990 with Bill, who was a career foreign service officer, because my role was disaster relief, particular during civil wars and emergencies. And Bill and I were in this refugee camp in southern Sudan, one of the most remote places on earth. There wasn’t a flush toilet in 1,000 kilometers, no paved roads. One of the most under-developed areas, mainly because it's been isolated for so long since its independence and the British decided to basically not develop the south, one of the causes of the civil war.

So anyway, we came to this camp. Bill went to the University in Michigan. We met these two guys [in U of M hat and shirt], and Bill asked, "Where did you get that shirt and hat?" One of the guys said, "I got it at the University of Michigan when I got my master's degree." And Bill said, "What are you doing in this camp?" . . . I don't know if he's still there or not, but they had this very interesting Japanese scholarship from USAID many years before, when you had a program there, and he got his master's degree at the University of Michigan, and he had come back and was teaching in a high school and then he got caught in the middle of the civil war.

So the second story. I was having a debate with Dr. Anwar-ul Haq Ahadi, the former finance minister of Afghanistan . . . He was the man who would control all of the money that they were spending for reconstruction in Afghanistan. I said that I had been ordered by the National Security Council to get certain things done and I had to get them done. I knew that if I gave him the money, if I told that to the Administration that they would have said that it looks very nice, but does that get the project done. Have to have a certain number of schools and health clinics and that sort of thing.

So we had this debate and we would get a little tense. He admitted to me that he had got all three of his degrees, undergraduate, master's degree and Ph.D., from the American University in Beirut . . . most of the expansion of the University since 1962 has been paid for by AID and AID has been a major contributor. More importantly, he also had AID scholarships.

So I said that he would have never gotten those scholarships and American University of Beirut would have never been developed if I had given all of the money to the finance minister of Lebanon. That ended the debate, and we went on to the next subject. The third story that I want to tell you is that I served in the first Gulf War as a soldier. My reserve unit was mobilized and I left the first Bush Administration and AID and I went on active duty to Kuwait.

My job was as the executive office of the unit that was planning to reconstruct Kuwait after the war was over. We were presuming that we were going to be based for some time from Kuwait. One of the problems that we had was that the PLO leadership, Yasser Arafat, endorsed the [Iraqi] invasion because Saddam had promised to help the [Palestinians] and that Kuwait would be their home. Kuwait would be turned over and that would be their new national home.

And of course, some Palestinians, for about a week, believed this and then realized later on that they were being manipulated by Saddam. Most of the Palestinians in Kuwait, of which there were 400,000 or 500,000, realized that this was ridiculous propaganda and this was not serious, but it did a lot of damage. The Kuwaitis were very angry because the Palestinians had been treated very well and had lived for 40 or 50 years in Kuwait.
And so there were human rights abuses in the beginning against the Kuwaitis and my unit went in to stop the human rights abuse. I went into the Palestinian neighborhoods and said that I knew that they didn't want American troops here because they didn't agree with us about nuclear power. And I thought that perhaps it wasn't a good idea to have troops in their neighborhoods. But we needed troops there so that we wouldn't have any more atrocities taking place in Kuwait.

So I asked if they wanted the Syrians there or the Egyptians there and I went through the whole list of the countries in which troops had come to participate in the war effort. I knew that they didn't want us, they didn't even like us, the Palestinians, but this is what they said. I had gone into a neighborhood and there were all of these, two or three hundred men, Palestinian men that were surrounding me.

My commanding officers said I was crazy, and if they were really angry, I wouldn't get out alive. I said that I would be fine. And what they said was this, and I will never forget this. They said that they may not agree with you on the political issues in the Holy Land, but virtually every family represented in the Palestinian community in Kuwait had at least one child that went to a university in the United States. And that they were always well treated, they were welcomed and they felt part of America for the time that they were in the United States. They said that because of that, they said that they loved America, even though they didn't agree on the political issues. […]

So I remember the stories from around the world . . . I believe that the best impression of America is not the worst impression of our culture, the pop culture. Our musicians and our movie stars are not truly representative of the American culture. The best representatives of American culture, in my view, are our universities and colleges. And they are regarded highly – our public universities, private universities, two year schools, four year schools, graduate schools.

You have people from around the world who attend our universities and who go back with a very favorable impression, and I think a much more accurate impression of what America is all about comes from the university system. And they go back to countries that are difficult. They have difficulty integrating people of different racial backgrounds, religious positions and ethnic positions. And they realize that there are models that work.
America is – and I say this as a hyphenated American whose ancestors immigrated to America exactly 100 years ago this month from Greece – America is a polyglot society with people from every country in the world. And somehow, even with our problems, we found a way to make this system work. It is one of the most successful societies in the world in a very unique and a very unusual way, and there are things about our society that we sometimes transfer and that other times is very inappropriate.

But people who come here and absorb who we are and what we do at universities understand that they can accept and reject whatever they want to. It’s up to them. It’s not being forced down their throats, you know. They hear it, they see it, they accept it, and they go back. And people who I find, who are frequently leaders in the reform movement in the developing world, are people who we have contacts with through the university system in the United States.

I can go through many examples of my friends in Africa and in Latin America and in Asia and in the Middle East who are at the forefront of democratic reform, I think of Mikhail Saakashvili, who is the President of Georgia, leading the charge and who went to the University of Chicago. And I can go through the list. If you go to most cabinets in developing countries, you will find maybe upwards of a third of the cabinet ministers have been educated in the United States.

The problem is that there has been a dramatic decline of scholarships over the last 25 years. In 1980, we provided 20,000 scholarships a year. In 1990, 1,090 scholarships. In the last few years, it was 1,000. And that is because the cost has gone up so much. There are new models for dealing with this, you need to deal with that. But I think frankly that this is a great tragedy. I think the best way to explain the American world and for us to understand the developing world is this way through education.

When we get educated – and I want to be clear – this is not a program where we train people in development. It is a way for people in the developing world of educating us and educating them. We exchange. That’s the greatness of the universities in a non-threatening way.

We are living through a profound change in the foreign policy of the United States right now. In the year 2000, we had [development assistance] of $10 billion dollars. In the year 2004, it went up to $19 billion and this year we expect it to be $24 billion. So there’s been a 140 percent increase in our budget under President Bush . . . There is a profound change going on deciding on the structure of the programs, the incentive systems in place and a review of who we give aid to and under what circumstances. Part of that took place actually before 9/11, but the 9/11 happening in the United States focused attention on problems in the developing world that might affect the United States.

It is not an accident that the three places where Al-Qaeda had its headquarters were countries that did not have a national government. They went to Sudan, another state, a recovering state now. And then where did they go? They went to Afghanistan. Why? Because there was no national government. The Taliban is not a national government. And so they basically purchased the national government of Afghanistan, the Taliban, by using the wealth of Al-Qaeda. And we had a very dangerous terrorist group that was purchasing influence in these countries.

So when people say to me, well, why are you going – it’s a waste of money. I said that, well, you think it’s a waste of money? Just look at Al-Qaeda. Do you think it’s irrelevant that their headquarters were in these three states where the governments are so weak they could not police their own society in the sense of criminal law. I believe that this is a time of innovation for foreign assistance and that we need to focus our attention on what we are doing to assist the developing world in accelerating the development process.

I think the notion of policy, ownership and sustainability are now the triad of our focus. For even people who are not experts, we all know how important those three things are. I think lots of policy becomes kind of difficult when we get into the details and not even realize that these are not our countries. You can’t tell them what to do in other countries. You need to understand that unless ownership of the country’s development is led by people in the country, the program is not going to be successful.
I would like to talk a little bit about some of the examples of what we are doing in the university community in this period of enormous change. The Minister of Higher Education from Afghanistan is here and I know upon the end of hostilities, after the hostilities in Iraq, the violence in both countries, I made it one of my top priorities as the Administrator of AID, with the support of the White House, to set a preference to help the universities and scholars re-establish links between their counterparts in other countries, not just the United States.

The University of Massachusetts, and the universities are joining with the ministry in spearheading efforts right now to restore the country’s education [system], from the top to the bottom with the support of their rapid teacher training and re-education in the teacher’s corps. In Iraq, one of the first things we did, which was almost unknown outside of our circle, is the idea that began in the HEAD program – the Higher Education and Development program.

And that brings together American, European and Iraqi universities, all part of the design of the program, the re-establishment of academic excellence in the Iraq higher education system. We have committed $27 million for that, to provide partnerships to support Iraqi universities, to develop human resources, methodologies, research techniques and curriculum reform, as well as in terms of the reform of the academics. To provide resources to the universities.

Last month in Guadalajara, Mexico, the Association Liaison Office for University Cooperation in Development organized an extremely successful university partnership for posterity conference for the TIES program, in which U.S. and Mexican universities partner to work to promote economic development across Mexico … Its design incorporates incentives if you can sustain the program, even after the withdrawal of public funding. They are creating a legacy of deepening ties between Mexican and U.S. institutions of higher learning. […]

I am convinced that the private sector must make and be an integral part of the development efforts and more extensively involved. And so we are doing things called global development alliances. A global development alliance is an alliance with non-traditional partners in the United States, corporations, foundations, and universities that do not typically do this. And we’ve invested $1.1 billion with 286 alliances in the private sector, mostly corporations and foundations, putting in $3.7 billion – $3.7 billion – in the last four years to build these developmental alliances.

In our university partnership program, which is emblematic of this new direction in foreign aid, over the past seven years we have had 246 institutional partnerships between universities in the United States, colleges, community colleges, and counterparts across 61 different countries. Almost 70 percent of these partnerships received seed grants of about $100,000, funded by our central office in Washington. And these grants are a one-to-one match, with additional funds from universities and the private sector.

I think if I were to ask the development experts here at the Agency what they thought our single most important development program was, they would mention education and training and this is along the lines of the ALO partnership program. When I became Administrator, I determined that we would focus our attention on renewing these important training programs. I determined that aspects of the ALO exchange training program itself is cost effective and a sustainful method to reverse these trends.

I hope that the breakout discussions will elaborate further on pilot programs for long-term training taking place in Mali, Afghanistan, India, and Uganda. These are cost effective models and they are designed to increase the number of trainees and reduce the costs of these programs. . . For example, Montana State University is working with a host of agricultural institutions in Africa to address the need for integrated agricultural field research and their education programs. This partnership will develop a stronger collaboration between teaching and research with a technology integrated center doing research projects and disseminating programs.

Seven Mali faculty researchers have received scholarships for graduate studies in the United States. In the pilot program, the students will initiate their formal studies in Mali, prior to coming to the United States for a period of one year. After which they will return to Mali in order to present their research there. The scholars will focus on agricultural development in Mali, including disease free tomatoes and potato tissue cultures, soil microbiology, and water quality.

I do think that our scholarship program needs to be integrated into the national development strategies of the countries that we’re partnering with. I think simply saying that scholarships are good is not sufficient. It needs to be integrated into the ministry work and to be developed with the partner countries. Before I leave the topic, I would first like to talk about the aspects of this program which are not sufficiently understood. And that is, that the old model of simply giving scholarships to people coming and then going back is not adequate. I think the whole notion of cost is having a certain influence on that. […]

But finally I would say that I think there’s a lot that could be done to facilitate it. I announced that we are going to have – and we haven’t had one in many years – a key scientific advisor and a chief economist who will attempt to bring scientific research and math to the forefront of our work. Because there is a lot of innovation in research that is going on that has relevance to the development needs for all of us in this room, whether it be the north and south, that never makes its way to the development programs, except by accident. And so we want a formal process to work now with the National Academy of Science on trying to formalize some system for tapping into this research.[…]

I want to close by mentioning Norman Borlaug, who is one of the creators, along with other scientists, of the green revolution in Asia. He gave the inaugural George C. Marshall address at AID, which was last year. He is 90 now and still teaching at Texas A&M part-time. He was quite remarkable in the lecture he gave on the notion of the green revolution in Africa, which is something I long argued that we need to do. We need to design something for the green revolution that would work in Africa that takes into account the culture and the social traditions, the soil conditions, the water resources of Africa.

But he’s talking about that still and I think that that is one more example of the university partnership program which is so effective in this new world. Thank you very much.

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Photo credits: The photos that accompany this report are courtesy of Ronna Eddington and Charlie Koo.

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