USAID

The week of July 12th I started working with USAID. I am super interested in this agency and feel so lucky that I had the chance to do some work for them and get to know staff members and ask millions of questions. Curt, the Mission Director, is amazing. He has had a really impressive and accomplished career and everyone really respects him. Also, every time I have talked to him I have been really impressed with how intelligent and insightful he is. The kind of person I feel as if I could just stand next to long enough maybe some of his knowledge might just accidently drift into my head.

Anyway I met with him and he asked me to do research on options for country-owned sustainable health financing in Malawi, with a specific focus on HIV/AIDS treatment. I don’t have any education in public health, however I am fairly comfortable with policy research so I agreed (plus I am really intimidated by him so I probably would have said yes to any topic).

I also met with Patrick, the Program Officer, who I have met at lots of social events previously. Patrick is really “cool” and fun and smart. It was weird being with him in such a professional setting and seeing how dynamics change in the office. He asked me to go on site visits with Archangel (yes, that is a guy’s real name) as he did data quality assessments. My role would be to use the USAID standard checklist to evaluate how the programs we visited incorporated gender.

Both of these projects turned out to be awesome. I got to visit projects from several big-time NGOs that are working in Malawi. I loved asking questions about gender, which sparked really interesting conversations about at what point is it appropriate to challenge local culture to promote gender equity.

I also really got into the research that Curt gave me. I contacted USAID staff in several different countries in Africa asking their opinion about health financing. I also found a lot of interesting methods that are being used to financing health throughout the continent. I worked on this project for 3 weeks and finally presented it to Curt the week of July 26th.

When I walked into Curt’s office for our meeting I was surprised to see that he had printed off the paper I sent him and had clearly read the whole thing and had taken notes in the margins. We had a wonderful conversation and Curt posed some really insightful questions about the whole issue. He also told me about when he used to work in Rwanda, and we talked a little about the research I had done on Rwanda for my senior capstone. I felt really lucky to have been able to talk to someone so experienced about the development topics that I am so passionate about. Anyway at the end of our conversation he asked me to present my research to a group of mission employees on August 11th. I am so excited and twice as nervous!