Bravo Obama, viva USAID!

The Obama administration made a terrific choice yesterday by deciding to appoint Raj Shah as the head of USAID, the government’s primary agency for international development. 

Dr. Shah’s mix of innovative thinking and leadership should give the agency a significant boost.  He is well-known to many in the global health and vaccines fields where, as a member of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Health team, he played key roles in the early days of the GAVI Alliance.  Those were heady times, filled with creative ideas, an urge to move faster than before, and business-like focus, and Raj Shah was often at the center of these ideas. 

His efforts to accelerate vaccines through GAVI yielded the PneumoADIP and RotaADIP projects, which borrowed principles from private-sector product launches and applied them to accelerating vaccine access for the world’s poorest countries.  He was a key driver of innovative financing tools for vaccines like the International Finance Facility for Immunization, which securitizes pledges of aid to create front-loaded investments in global development, and the Advance Market Commitment for vaccines, a results-based mechanism to accelerate new vaccines for poorer countries at affordable prices.

That a medical doctor with Wharton business school training would be involved in innovative health financing is probably not surprising, even if it is not typical.  But then we lost him from global health as the Gates Foundation elevated him to leading their global efforts on agriculture.  So what explains this rise and breadth of responsibilities that has now led to appointment as USAID Administrator?  Quite simply, his creativity, ability to say way beyond the horizons that most of us can see, and a wisdom that goes beyond his years have all lead to this point. Dr. Shah is just the medicine that USAID needs.

 

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