Each year the USAID Higher Education Solutions Network (HESN) provides the opportunity for HESN Lab-affiliated students (including Duke University through the SEAD Program) the opportunity to bring their talents to various programs at USAID. Since the beginning of the HESN internship program, Duke University has sent 14 interns to USAID. See the 2015 cohort here. See the 2016 cohort here.

This summer, USAID has released 32 HESN internships, the largest number yet! Internships encompass a wide range of topics including global health, public policy, education, communications, and data analysis. To get a feel of for previous Duke HESN interns and their experience, check out some of their blogs about their internships:
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• Kaylan Christofferson: Interned with the Global Partnerships Team at the Global Development Lab
• Courtney Cobb: Interned with Center for Accelerating Innovation and Impact
• Divya Giyanani: Interned with the Global Development Lab
• Vinesh Kapil: Interned with Saving Lives at Birth ​​

​The Higher Education Solutions Network (HESN) is a partnership between USAID’s Global Development Lab and seven world-class universities to create a constellation of Development Labs; the Social Entrepreneurship Accelerator at Duke (SEAD) is one of the HESN Labs. This network harnesses the ingenuity and passion of university students, researchers, faculty, and their innovative partners to incubate, catalyze and scale science and tech-based solutions to the world’s most challenging development problems.
 
SEAD is an interdisciplinary hub leveraging the strengths of partners around Duke, including the Innovations in Healthcare at Duke Medicine, the Center for the Advancement for Social Entrepreneurship at the Fuqua School of Business, and the Duke Global Health Institute. SEAD takes an ecosystem approach to provide innovators in global health with the knowledge, systems, and networks to succeed and to engage faculty and students in advancing the field.  SEAD identifies such innovators or “social entrepreneurs” around the world who have found potentially transformative ways to solve common challenges in global health, and helps them extend their impact to a larger scale. This support includes capacity-building, mentoring, technical assistance, and help in attracting investment and funding.  See SEAD’s website (www.dukesead.org) for more information.
 
One of the major objectives of HESN and SEAD is to engage students in solving distinct development challenges.  USAID is piloting this internship program with HESN universities to contribute to this objective, and to further catalyze a global interdisciplinary ecosystem of individuals and institutions that shares knowledge, promotes learning, and builds mutual capacity.  USAID/HESN is offering internships in a number of disciplines to attract students with a wide variety of skill sets and interests.  Through the internship program, students will also have the opportunity to interact with students from other HESN universities (www.usaid.gov/hesn), which will help to promote knowledge-sharing, and collaboration across the HESN network.  

HESN is offering a student internship program open to graduate and undergraduate students from within the HESN university network (of which Duke is a part). These internships will take place over the summer with offices at USAID/Washington.  USAID has released 32 HESN intern position opportunities for Summer 2017, including brief descriptions of each assignment.  Each student may apply for up to three of the listed opportunities.  Students can find out more information about the particular USAID office and focal area of work (i.e. global health or education) at http://www.usaid.gov/what-we-do and other pages on the USAID website.  Internship assignments should contribute to both the Lab’s work (i.e. SEAD’s work, although this need not be limited to global health) and the goals of the hosting office within USAID.
Note that the HESN Student Internship is unpaid, but SEAD is planning to provide small stipends (amount TBD) to a number of students; students may be able to seek funding from sources around campus to cover summer costs.

​Duke undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral students are invited to apply; students who will have recently graduated are also eligible.  Interns must be U.S. citizens and able to obtain a government-issued security clearance (which USAID will facilitate).  If security clearance is not granted before the start of the internship, the intern may participate virtually. Please note that dual citizens are unlikely to obtain security clearance in time to participate in the program. 

If applicants have questions or concerns, please email Kimberly.langsam@duke.edu or hesn.internship@usaid.gov and use the subject line “HSIP LastName…”
 
To learn about other USAID internships outside of the HESN program, see: http://www.usaid.gov/work-usaid/careers/student-internships.  For USAID Global Health Fellows Program Internships, see http://www.ghfp.net/internships/.  

As a software engineer, there's a lot to think about if asked what to expect in any software or application. However, when it comes to the health sector, a worker would expect at most two features from a software:

• Ease of use: Perform tasks using less time and energy.
• Efficiency: Perform many tasks better with the use of the computerized system.

My internship project entailed working on a health management information system currently being used by Afya Research Africa (ARA) in their Ubuntu Afya clinics which are located in several counties in Kenya. The development of the system started almost ten years ago, by Dr. Moses Ndiritu, whom I have been honored to work with throughout my stay at ARA. I was part of the software development team that was working on improving and adding new functionalities to the system.

I spent my project working specifically with the StoneHMIS system, which was developed using the Zend framework. Developing a health system requires some basic knowledge on the processes carried out in clinics. Considering that I have little background knowledge in medicine, working together with a medical doctor was a big asset to me.

The fact that the design and development of StoneHMIS was started by a medical doctor has made a big difference to other health management information systems since it is customized to:

• Reduce wait times experienced by patients and make necessary information easily accessible to doctors.
• Reduce workload for all clinic staff, including doctors, nurses, pharmacists, etc.
• Support easy access of patient data/ information to the allowed staff.
• Preserve patient's privacy.
• Fit in the context of health system institutions in countries such as Kenya.

Throughout my work at ARA I wondered how many lives could be saved, or disabilities avoided if patient wait times in hospitals were reduced, and if doctors had easy access to needed information in a timely manner. These questions greatly motivated me and guided my work. Consider a scenario where the patient information wasn't conveyed accurately to the care providers.  This would be a disadvantage to the patient, and impact the quality of the healthcare received.

Apart from developing the system, I learned a lot in terms of medical procedures, as well as improving my programming skills. Software development usually involves many programming languages while working on different projects, especially when one is new to the field. However, during my study at Carnegie Mellon University in Rwanda (CMUR), I learned that the most important aspect in programming is the algorithm used and its adaptability to any language that can solve an intended problem. I managed to apply this knowledge in the development of the health system I was working on to ensure that more lives are saved.

“So basically your job is to compare apples to oranges?”
 
This was one professor’s amused (and insightful) remark when I showed her the scope of work for my internship just before I left for my summer at USAID. Within a few days on the job, I quickly realized my professor was right. Fortunately, this made for both a challenging and exceptionally valuable learning experience.
 
I was lucky enough to have the opportunity last summer to intern with the Global Partnerships Team within USAID’s Global Development Lab. One of the Partnership Team’s main focus areas is entrepreneurship, including finding ways to bridge what is known as the ‘pioneer gap.’ The pioneer gap in this context describes the disconnect that persists between investors and early-stage entrepreneurs in the developing world. Entrepreneurs have great ideas for businesses that will create jobs and provide much-needed goods and services. Investors want to invest capital in great ideas, often to generate a financial return and/or create a social impact.
 
One way that USAID is working to bridge the pioneer gap is through the Partnering to Accelerate Entrepreneurship (PACE) Initiative, which includes around a dozen public-private partnerships across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Each PACE partnership model is unique, but all share the goal of helping early-stage entrepreneurs refine their business models to attract more private investment.
 
While more time and data are needed to fully analyze all the individual PACE models, one summer was enough to convince me that PACE-like partnerships have significant potential to bridge the pioneer gap. Two of my most significant learnings were the following (the first involves a common misperception corrected and the second involves a firmly held personal belief further confirmed):
 

• Foreign aid can be smart, targeted, and data-driven. People may imagine foreign aid as the government simply giving money away. While this can be true, it is not the full story. PACE provides an excellent example of how government can target its resources to promote sustainable, bottom-up solutions. By empowering other committed stakeholders and encouraging them to develop financially self-sustaining models, PACE creates a multiplier effect – increasing the impact of each dollar and ensuring this impact continues long after USAID’s grant funding is spent.

 

• What matters is the people. I learned this in my previous jobs in the private and nonprofit sectors, but I realized it is equally or more important in the public sector. The job of managing PACE partnerships cannot be filled by just anyone. The core PACE team members, Rob Schneider and Matt Guttentag, have an exceptional skillset. They could speak the language and understand the motivations of every stakeholder in a partnership. They adapted their style seamlessly to facilitate collaboration between groups from every imaginable sector and geography. They approached grantee relationships as true thought partnerships. Rob and Matt embody the concept of tri-sector leadership, and anything less than this caliber would undervalue the potential impact of these partnerships.

 
Overall, my internship left me feeling inspired, hopeful, and filled with a renewed sense of urgency. But it also confirmed a hard truth - there is not going to be a single breakthrough moment or concept that will suddenly empower entrepreneurs to eliminate poverty overnight. A robust ecosystem is needed to nurture and sustain entrepreneurship. Building ecosystems takes time. And of course, entrepreneurship is only one piece of the puzzle. But the absence of entrepreneurship is both a cause and consequence of poverty, which makes it a profoundly powerful piece of the puzzle.
 
I am excited to see how the PACE partnerships unfold and help solve this puzzle, as well as how they improve countless people’s lives along the way.