by Gabriela Asturias

I boarded a plane to Bogotá, Colombia on Tuesday October 3rd, 2017. I was selected to attend the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) global engagement meeting sponsored by the Research Councils UK. Around 120 people from Colombia, the UK, and around the world met to discuss how we can collaborate on cutting edge research to tackle the sustainable development goals. The theme was clear—addressing the problems faced by developing countries is a global effort and building partnerships is essential. These partnerships are an exchange to build research capacity in developing countries and acquire the ability to reframe the problem with cultural competence, a perspective brought in by the local researchers.
 
This meeting was an opportunity to represent the Partnership for Enhanced Engagement in Research (PEER) program at the U.S. Global Development Lab of USAID. My internship with PEER lasted twelve weeks. I measured the impact of the PEER health research programs across the world on policy, programs, and sustainable development. The aim was to quantify and advocate for the importance of science in development.
 
Three lessons I learned while working at USAID:
 
1. Science is fun.
Science has the potential to impact a person, community, region,  and country. Research findings can be implemented into development programs, government national programs, and adopted into policy. This is possible when a research protocol is designed to tackle a problem that the potential beneficiaries and country officials perceive as a problem. 

2. Development is local. 
In order to implement research findings in the context where the research was done, it is essential to involve local stakeholders in the process. It is more efficient to work with local scientists because oftentimes they already have connections with local public and private entities. We found that research led by a local scientist with existing ties to a government entity will more likely be adopted because its relevance will be recognized. Local scientists understand how to leverage local resources and the cultural context. 

3. USAID, like development, adapts. 
I worked at USAID during a period of transition—a new administrator was appointed and the process of redesign was beginning. The new administration priorities started to shape the organization, the bureaus that were prioritized, and the budget allocation. The U.S. Global Development Lab is a young bureau, launched in 2014, under the Obama administration. I worked on the PEER program which began in 2011 and is now entering its final 3 years. New mechanisms are being designed that aim to incorporate lessons learned through the experience with PEER and other programs. The PEER team is a group of passionate scientists that want to translate their values of development into the new mechanisms—development is local and the role of research in development is transformative. 

After this internship I am going back to Guatemala, my home country. The skills learned from PEER can be directly translated into my work at FUNDEGUA, a Guatemalan nonprofit I co-founded with Duke Global Health professor: Dr. David Boyd. FUNDEGUA works to close the gap—between aid and data, programs and communities—by cultivating a local research ecosystem that informs sustainable development. 

​

Originally from Guatemala, Gabriela graduated from Duke University in 2017 and received a B.S. in Neuroscience and minor in Chemistry. In Summer 2017, she participated in the USAID Higher Education Solutions Network Summer Internship Program, with support from SEAD.  She is the Co-Founder and President of FUNDEGUA, a foundation that promotes culturally-sensitive, research-driven aid in Guatemala. They aim to strengthen the local ecosystem of research to inform sustainable development initiatives.

As summer begins here in Durham, North Carolina, and Duke’s campus quiets down, we’re readying the latest cohort of Innovations in Healthcare interns for their summers working with SEAD and Innovations in Healthcare Innovators in East Africa.
​
This year’s interns will be hosted by an inspiring group of social ventures:

• Health Builders – Based in Kigali, Rwanda, Health Builders works with local and national governments to improve healthcare delivery in the country with a focus on the core drivers that determine health and illness.
• Jacaranda Health – Jacaranda Health is a member of the first cohort of SEAD Innovators. With a focus on reproductive health services for poor women in urban Kenya, Jacaranda Health combines business and clinical innovations to create a self-sustaining and scalable chain of women’s health clinics.
• LifeNet International – LifeNet International has been a member of SEAD since 2014. Operating across East Africa, LifeNet International strengthens local healthcare capacity by partnering with community health centers to improve their medical and administrative capacity while also connecting them with necessary pharma and medical equipment.

With experience in business and public policy, the summer interns have many insights to shares with the Innovators:

• Tanmayata Bansal - Originally from New Delhi, India, Tanmayata is currently a Master of Public Policy (MPP) student at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. She also holds a master’s degree in financial economics and an undergraduate business degree from Delhi University, where she co-founded Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE), a student-led organization promoting social entrepreneurship. Before joining Duke, Tanmayata worked with Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, South Asia (J-PAL SA). Working with women and children during SIFE and J-PAL guides her motivation to improve access to healthcare in India at an effective cost.
• Ben Fong - Ben is originally from Boston, Massachusetts, and studied biology and chemistry at the University of Toronto. After graduation, he served for six years in the United States Navy as a supply officer and has deployed several times throughout the Asia-Pacific region. He is currently pursuing an MBA and a certificate in Health Sector Management at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.
• Emily Mason - Emily is pursuing an MBA at Fuqua and comes to the program with global health, private sector, and government experience. Prior to Duke, Emily worked within the Center for Accelerating Innovation and Impact at USAID and worked in Global Collateral Services Marketing and Alternative and Broker-Dealer Services Marketing at BNY Mellon. Emily served as a health educator for Support for International Change in Arusha and Babati, Tanzania.
• Adeline Sutanto - Adeline is currently an MBA student at Fuqua. Prior to business school, she was working with A.T. Kearney as a management consultant for South East Asia region. Adeline’s passion in healthcare improvement is mainly influenced by her experience teaching in rural Indonesia and her drug development research with Dexa Medica pharmaceutical company.

The interns will be with their hosting organizations through July and return to Duke in August to finalize deliverables. Stay tuned at the end of this summer for their personal stories working with our inspiring innovators!

As the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals shifted into the Sustainable Development Goals, one of the driving efforts that remained a priority was the movement for gender equality. After two years of acknowledging the critical role of women and girls in science and technology, the General Assembly gathered on December 22, 2015 and declared February 11th of each year to be International Women and Girls in Science Day.

Although half of the U.S. population is female and 48% of all jobs go to women, only 24% of STEM jobs are actually held by women. Taking a step back and looking at the global statistics, women accounted for less than a quarter (24.8%) of individuals employed in research and development in 2013.

Today, we highlight some of our female SEAD Innovators as pioneers in their STEM fields. Thanks to the leadership of these inspiring women in their communities and across borders, the healthcare sector is that much closer to achieving affordability, accessibility and quality services and technologies.

​50% of all hospital admissions and deaths in Kenya are related to non-communicable diseases. By 2030, non-communicable diseases are projected to be the leading cause of death in Africa.

This is just one statistic that highlights the healthcare challenges East Africa faces. Yet even with these challenges, a system ripe for innovation and opportunity exists, with the Thomson Reuters Foundation naming Nairobi as a hot spot for social impact entrepreneurs.

Navigating the healthcare ecosystem in East Africa can present a challenge to many of these burgeoning entrepreneurs. The SEAD team took a look at the ecosystem to discover the role of public and private sectors in spurring innovation, challenges with the health financing market in Kenya and Uganda, and what innovation environment and support systems are currently in place in the two countries.

The outcome is our latest white paper, Healthcare Innovation in East Africa: Navigating the Ecosystem. Authors Patricia Odero, Sylvia Sable, Jennifer Cook, and Krishna Udayakumar interviewed key stakeholders in Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda, uncovering current ecosystem trends, including:

• Creating patient and provider networks
• Improving quality of care
• Developing technologies that improve efficiency and financial sustainability

The white paper also explores a number of implications for healthcare entrepreneurs, investors in the region, and government entities, such as the value of partnerships with the public sector to scale healthcare innovation in East Africa and the opportunities that exist in the digital health space that require connecting the dots between the health and tech industries.

​Are you interested in social entrepreneurship, global health, and/or emerging markets? Want to use your strategy, communications, or consulting skills to benefit a small and growing business? The SEAD/Innovations in Healthcare summer internship matches talented interns with innovative organizations around the world that are increasing access to quality healthcare in emerging markets. 

Past interns have worked with our innovators in both India and East Africa, spending at least six weeks in the country the social enterprise is based in. Want to see what our interns have worked on? Check out some of their stories:

The internship is open to all current and graduating MBA, MD/MBA, MIDP, and MPP students. The internship projects and deliverables are tailored to the students' interests and skills, as well as the needs of our innovators. Students will also be expected to deliver a written product built around lessons learned during their internship, a blog post about their internship, and present their findings to the Innovations in Healthcare and SEAD teams at the end of the summer.

The internship is between 10 to 12 weeks, full-time, with at least 6 weeks on site with the hosting organization. Interns will receive compensation. The internship is also eligible for the CASE Summer Internship Fund for Fuqua students.

With the advent of technology and the increasing popularization of big data, it can seem like an obsolete task to spend time gaining qualitative insights through conversation. But the importance of human connection is still of the utmost importance in this age of technology. It is probably even more important now than ever before. During TechCon 2016, the theme came to light in multiple conversations throughout the conference.

While discussing the skill set needed for the next generation of development practitioners, the overwhelming majority of panelists pointed at words like humble, connected, grounded, and empathetic. This shows the continuing need for us to develop not only our technical skill set but our emotional and mental skill sets. Development work relies on the people doing it to be compassionate as much as it requires them to be data driven.

This sentiment was heightened in the session dealing with mobile technology for development which I thought was a bit ironic. The speakers emphasized the need for practitioners to really understand the communities they are working for and sometimes the greatest insights come from conversations with the people living there. One of the speakers said, “a phone is not a phone is not a phone.” A confusing phrase but it demonstrates an important point. A phone technologically is the same in two environments but that does not mean it is utilized in the same way. Our ability to understand the way different cultures use technology is as important as the technology. As we innovate and produce newer, more innovative technology, the importance of understanding human behavior and it's culturally-specific nuances cannot always be reduced to data.

The importance of connection and empathy is relevant not only when dealing with populations across the globe but even at home. You don’t need to wait to be in another country to start developing these skills. One of the closing speakers suggested going as close as the next zip code over and starting to have these conversations and starting to understand people. I cannot agree more, especially now. The importance of the human connection cannot be understated. 

Priyanka is a current senior in Economics with a minor in Global Health and a certificate in Innovation and Entrepreneurship. She is really interested in the ways businesses and public-private partnerships can help improve and empower the world. ​

How do social entrepreneurs leap the chasm from idea to sustainable impact at scale?


That’s been the question we’ve been obsessed with since the start of CASE. We know that some social ventures are able to achieve dramatic scaling of their impact but for most organizations the impact they generate is small in relation to the scale of the problems they aim to address.
To help uncover why some organizations are more successful at scaling their impact than others, as well as identifying other trends in the social impact field, CASE is developing the first ever Global Social Impact CEO Survey.


What is the Global Social Impact CEO Survey? This groundbreaking study will create a longitudinal study of the experiences and learnings of social impact leaders at the CEO level, including nonprofit and for-profit social ventures and impact investors. The resulting reports and tools will provide a leadership lens on trends, perceptions, and predictions about achieving sustainable impact at scale.


CASE is seeking a consultant and/or consulting team to partner with us in designing our strategy for implementing the Global Social Impact CEO Survey. Proposals must show knowledge of the global social impact sector trends, latest research, and key players. Ideal candidates will also have prior successful experience in large-scale, national survey work.


We’re looking for a consultant that will provide us with a landscape analysis for the survey and develop 2-3 models for survey modeling and implementation. Additionally, we may extend the work to the survey design and survey execution and analysis phases of the Global Social Impact CEO Survey depending on expertise level and proposed budget.
​

Want to learn more? Take a look at the full RFP here. Work will start immediately and the first two phases of deliverables must be ready for presentation in Durham, NC, on February 9th, 2017. RFP applications are due on January 5th, 2017.

Last year, we announced our work on Smart Impact Capital, a cutting edge concept for preparing social impact entrepreneurs for raising the right kind of capital for their ventures.

In August, we unveiled the first three modules in the series after months of beta testing and fine tuning. The response to those first three modules has been staggering; this is a tool that the social impact space needs.

Now we need your help. As the Smart Impact Capital project has grown, we have the need for a talented writer with experience in the impact investing space to work with us on completing the final modules in the series.

We’re looking for someone that can take big, often complicated ideas and translate them into accessible, practical language that any busy entrepreneur can readily digest in our bite-sized lessons. What makes Smart Impact Capital so unique is the practitioner-friendly approach that we take on walking entrepreneurs through the capital raising process and that will be a critical element to the writing you will be doing for the modules.
​
Does this sound like you? Then we encourage you to take a look at the full RFP here. We anticipate the work taking 10-20 hours/week and to be completed by June 2017. RFP applications are due on December 12th.

 A few years back, social entrepreneurship had not gained the widespread reception and popularity that it receives now. As social impact increased in popularity so has the ecosystem that supports it. Capital plays an important role in this ecosystem, helping enable social innovations to reach scale. Capital comes in a variety of forms, ranging from grant funding to impact investments. During the various life cycles of social innovation, different forms of funding make sense.

During TechCon 2016, the yearly gathering of the USAID Higher Education Solutions Network, two SEAD innovators, Zeena Johar, founder of SughaVazhvu, and Nick Pearson, founder of Jacaranda Health, spoke on this very issue during the panel session Get Ready for Funding. The panel also included Jennifer Potts, Deputy Director of Innovations in Healthcare, and Cathy Clark, Director of the CASE Initiative on Impact Investing and Co-Principal Investigator of SEAD. 

These innovators, while working on different innovations and markets, experienced similar stories with regards to funding their ventures. SughaVazhvu is a healthcare venture based in India that offers low-cost primary healthcare services to underserved populations through their unique clinic system. Jacaranda Health, meanwhile, operates a chain of clinics focused on reproductive health services for low income women in urban centers in Kenya.

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:
​

• 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/.