 And it's a real personal pleasure to have Don Steinberg, who's the deputy administrator at AID, here for what we're calling an exit interview. This is a chevron form, and it's very appropriate to be having this as a chevron form, as we'll discuss a little bit later. But I have it on good authority from many sources that the career staff at AID and the career staff at the State Department are going to miss you very much, Don. And I think it's only fitting that we say goodbye in a proper way and thank you for your public service. So we're really grateful that you agreed to take time out of your busy schedule. I think, as you can see from the audience, you have a number of friends and family from the development community here who wanted to show up and say thank you by being here. So it's really great to have you. I think many of you have seen Don Steinberg's biography. He was a career foreign service officer at the State Department. He was Ambassador to Angola. He had a number of very interesting postings overseas, but also served at the White House, served in policy planning. And now he's been at AID for the last two and a half years. About three. About three. About three. And you're starting a new job after a very long rest on Monday for three days. You're going to be the CEO of World Learning. Right. Okay, great. I'll tell you a little bit about World Learning and about that. But I think it's fair to say that Don Steinberg was an Africanist before Africa was cool. And he's somebody who is very passionate about development. You took some time off in between public service to be at the International Crisis Group in a past life. So we're really thrilled to have you. Well, why don't we do the following. I've got a series of questions for you and you've seen them, so you shouldn't be too... You weren't supposed to say that. Okay, all right. You've got all the answers. You're supposed to be off the cuff and brilliant and very, you know, a little bit. But I think you, I think the first question I want to ask you though is about the global partnership with post-Boussaint. You were involved with the negotiations, I guess that was in 2011. And so we, it's thinking about, okay, what's, this is part of the Paris Accra, Busan Conversation, thinking about what does the future development look like. Talk a little bit about that, because I think it's driven a number of things in this administration. We spend a lot of time talking about this issue. So you may just spend just a minute to what the heck is this thing and what does it mean, what does it mean for the United States? Dan, that wasn't one of the questions. Oh, well... I'm kidding. No, the... I think the Busan conference that we had in South Korea at the end of 2011 really did set a new paradigm for development. I think we were building on Paris and Accra and some of the other processes underway. But in each of those previous sessions, there was a sense that these were the donors who were coming together and defining what the reality was. And I think we're in a new era. I think we're in an era of empowerment where governments in developing countries are no longer going to accept policies that we make in Washington or the World Bank or in New York or Brussels or Beijing, for that matter. And so this was much more of a coming together of governments from developed and developing countries. Civil society was there in force. The business community was there in force. And I think it defined what development today is all about. The document that came from the process was important, but I think much of what it did was to simply reinforce some of the principles we had talked about before. And that was issues of results at the center of development, inclusive development, transparency, the need to untie assistance, issues related to predictability of assistance. But then, unfortunately, following the agreement's signature, there was too long of a delay. And if I'm going to speak honestly, we didn't keep the momentum up from that process. And we entered into a process to try to restructure our working groups and our way of communicating. And we lost a lot of the momentum. I think this year... You mean the development community. The development community, USAID, the other donors, all of us. The response to that was to set up an institution called the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation, which is the implementation body for Busan. It is basically the how of development if you sort of look at the MDGs and the post-MDG debate as the what of development. And what we have tried to do in advance of a new ministerial summit that's likely to take place in February of next year... This is like the next Busan? The next Busan, but it's really a two-year review of where we have come. It isn't going to be a big, public, let's... Jamboree. Jamboree where hundreds of people come, et cetera. And we create all these expectations. We think we know how to do development now as a global community. And so what we've said is we're going to focus on four types of issues. The first is ensuring that countries have the capacity to do their own domestic resource mobilization. And if you think about it, the U.S. government provides some $30 billion worth of development assistance. The NGO community in the United States and faith-based organizations provide $40 billion. Remittances are $100 billion, and we all talk about the trillion dollars of foreign investment that occurs, but the real source of development financing is domestic resource mobilization. $8 trillion is generated in that context. And so what we needed to talk about was how do you effectively do that? How do you raise domestic resources and how do you effectively spend them? So that's one thing. The second is how do you involve the private sector? How do you recognize that development is more than governments coming together? It's even more than governments and non-governmental organizations. The third leg of that stool is clearly the private sector, and we're not doing a good enough job in that space. The third issue that we're going to be addressing is South to South cooperation and South to South learning. Going on the experiences of the South Koreas, the Indias, the South Africa's, the Brazils to work effectively with developing countries to address their common concerns, and also to use it from the standpoint of triangular cooperation. So the United States working with India to promote African agriculture, which is already going on. And then finally the United States in particular has been pressing the concept of inclusive development, which means, and we're going to, I think, talk about that later, but the concept that development is more than simply achieving high growth rates. It demands that you reach out to key constituencies, marginalized groups in the community. So we're going to try to bring all those threads together in the context of the summit, the ministerial conference that will occur early next year. And hopefully that will create a new sense of momentum that we can pick up on some of the threads of Busan. I guess the last thing I wanted to say is that one of the very positive things that happened at Busan that we also let slip was drawing some of the emerging donors under the tent. So we did have China there, we had India there, we had Brazil, et cetera. And we had hoped that that would be, and they all agreed with the summit outcome document, we thought that that would be enough to really bring them under the tent and to start to really work with them intensively, it didn't happen, it hasn't happened yet, but it's a work in progress. Let me just share the Chinese vice-minister of finance that's just been named the new head of UNIDO. We exited UNIDO 20 years ago. It's really sort of the UN agency for middle-income countries. It's about south to south of cooperations, it's about trade, it's about standards. And we just did a, we're just doing a piece, we just released a piece on sort of our analysis of what this means for the United States. And it's interesting because we were in Costa Rica 10 days ago and they were mounting a campaign to run for a UN agency just like the U.S. would do or I've never seen a high-level Chinese official. Margaret Chan was from Hong Kong, but not a Chinese government official. The gentleman who's the head of IFC is a former business person, but again, it's a slightly different field than this. So it was very interesting the fact that China is going all in on a UN agency and they see it I think as a vehicle of south-south cooperation and as a vehicle for their own development. And so I think this issue of post-Busan and the south-south cooperation, which is something we don't pay a lot of attention to in the U.S. or have it historically, maybe in the last five years or six years, more so, is going to have an increased resonance and relevance. I also think we're going to have to encourage countries to pay their taxes. We can disagree on what the tax rate is, but getting people to participate in the formal economy and paying their taxes is something very important. And we here supported the doing business indicators work and I know the administration has been great on this. And one of the reasons you want to support the doing business indicators is because you want people to participate in the formal economy. You want them to pay taxes and follow the rules of the society. Well, that's what the domestic resource mobilization pillar is about and it's interesting. The person who is most pushing that agenda is Minister Nkozi from Nigeria. And she points out that for every dollar that the United States or another country spends in enhancing the capacity to enforce tax regulations, we raise $350 in a developing country. The French are really good at this. We got to get better at this. And we don't like talking about it in the U.S. system because we have a disagreement in the U.S. system on the levels of taxes. But I think we should all agree on if there are tax laws, people should pay their taxes. There should be a culture of paying taxes. My wife is from a country where if you pay your taxes, you're an idiot and there are many countries in the world that's like that and that's a bad cultural norm. It's a wrong cultural norm. So I agree. Let me use this. I didn't know your wife was from Texas. You're bad. Oh, boy. This is going to go downhill quickly, I suspect. Just on this issue of Busan because I think I want to, I suspect that U.S. aid forward and some of the procurement reform work was driven from sort of a post-Busan conversation in terms of when we had discussions and there are folks in the room here who are experienced some of this in terms of what do I mean by procurement reform? I think I'm sure you can explain it far better than I can. But there were some changes in how, there were a series of reforms, there were six or seven pieces in the U.S. aid forward agenda. I'd be curious if you could just talk a little bit about looking, now that you've had it for several years, if you could talk about U.S. aid forward and then I would like you to talk a little bit about the procurement reform agenda in particular because I think there's been some tensions in the implementer community vis-a-vis the administration that perhaps didn't necessarily have to be there and that's a, you know, we've done some work on that here. But if you could talk, but I think some of the U.S. aid forward and certainly the procurement reform was driven partially by the Busan agenda, at least I think that's been driving some of it because some of the people in the implementer community say, well, why are they doing this 30 percent number and then people would then begin to speculate and so it wasn't very constructive and my view was that much of it is driven by the Busan conversation. That's actually completely wrong, but we'll get to that in a second. Tell me why I'm wrong. But I'll get to that in a second though, keep everyone waiting. The U.S. aid reform agenda, you know, sort of, you're right, the, what we call implementation and procurement reform has gotten most of the attention. But I think what the excitement about U.S. aid forward has been is the success we've seen in other areas. So we had a real problem when this administration came in, which was the evisceration in past administrations and this goes back quite some time of a number of aspects of what U.S. aid is trying to do. And I think it largely shifted in the mid-2000s, so I'm not making this into a partisan thing. But the truth was we had lost basically 40 percent of our staff while implementing huge budgets. And we transformed from largely a development agency into a procurement and a contracting agency. And we have some great partners who are doing great work out there, both in the NGO community and in the contracting community. But at the same time, we just needed to rebuild our staff. And so one of the things we've done very successfully is bring on 1,000 new people. And we now have this bizarre situation where more than half of our staff have been on the job for five years or less. And they're coming in with some fabulous ideas. They're all tech savvy. They are coming from the private sector. They're coming from NGOs. They're coming from groups. Former military folks. Former military. They're bringing in new attitudes. You know, we're teaching them the ropes, but they're teaching us how to re-tie those ropes in new ways. And we just have to be flexible enough as an institution to accommodate that. It's actually funny when I address incoming classes, I used to get these talking points that say, I'm supposed to tell all these people to be teachable and malleable. And I would always take the talking points and rip them up and say, no, that's not what I'm trying to tell you. And then I did this two or three times. And then the guy who was writing the talking points was in the audience each time. And so finally I went up to him and I said, you hear me do this every single time. What's going on? And he said, well, you know, I'm not stupid. I got it. But you have so much fun ripping up those talking points, and it's such a great story. You could do that here if you want to. Beyond that, the science and technology and innovation side was something that we needed to really get back on. We can measure that in part by how many AAAS fellows we had. We are the agency that has used more AAAS fellows than any other agency. And yet when this transformation started, we were down to basically zero. We had ignored the science, technology area. And this is the future of development. I'm convinced that the single biggest element that's going to allow us to reach new heights is 6.5 billion cell phones in the hands of people. So we are developing with students around this country a new technology where you can take a cell phone, put it into a machine, put a blood sample there, and immediately you can find out whether you have malaria or not, 96% accuracy. You know, I've had malaria eight times in my life. The scariest time is that period between when you think you've got it and when the test comes back. And because you don't want to take the curative dose, it's toxic if you take it too many times. And yet you can die from cerebral malaria within 24 hours. And I've had cerebral malaria once. So this will allow people immediately to come up with the solution as to whether they have malaria or not. Now the problem is it's way too expensive. We can't afford the technology involved. But the people who came up with this idea brought it to us and said, we can't take this to scale, but maybe you can. And so we're linking up with the private sector. We're linking up with non-governmental organizations. We're linking up with universities around the country to see how we can do this. And this is, you know, this is the exciting part of it. You know, we're talking about hackathons and we're talking about data peluses and open sources. I don't know what they are, but I know they're already there. You know, I used to think hackers were bad people and now we're working with a group that calls itself random hacks of kindness. So, you know, it's just great. So we've got that going on. Can we put that on the Twitter machine? Please. What's Twitter? Yeah, what is that thing anyway? Do you flap your wings? So the, so the, so if you say science and technology and innovation are two and three, number four that we're working on is monitoring and evaluation. Because we basically, as an institution, we're not a learning institution. We were not going back and looking at our successes, our failures, and saying, are we achieving anything here? And so we required our posts to do high quality evaluations. We've done 185 of those in the last two years. They're all on our websites. We, in many cases, have used the knowledge, midstream, to fine tune the program as we move ahead. It's been really a game changer for our posts around the world. We also, sort of the fifth and the sixth reforms were to re-establish our budget capability. Here, here, very, which was great. And it is re-established. We have a full-time office of budget and resource management where we prepare our own budget. We submit it to the State Department. They incorporate it into the OMB. But that's a major shift because up until that point, we were a $20 billion organization without a budget office. And number six is our Bureau of Policy Planning and Learning where we seriously, we did not have any planning division within USAID. When PPC was removed, it was like having a lobotomy to the agency. It was very bad. I wouldn't go that far because I would get strangled if I went back to my agency after saying that. But it is true that we were. And I don't mean, I mean in the sense that it was, it damaged the agency and it hurt the agency to have to have the agency. No, I used to use the line that we were like the Wizard of Oz, that we still had a heart. We still had courage, but we didn't have a brain. And I got killed for it. I'm never saying, oh, I just did say it. Oh, god. So we have now adopted, and I'm sure you know, policies. We have a new policy framework for 2011, 2015. We have a youth policy that Nicole Golden was so much involved in producing. We have policies on gender empowerment. We have policies on water, policies on monitoring and evaluation, youth and development, a wide variety of other gender related policies. And these are driving our agency. On the procurement reform issue, the reason. And just before you go to the other sex, I think there's, you're not going to have any disagreement from anybody. I think people stood up and said, this is great. This is here, here. I think on any of those issues, I think it's been a, those have been great accomplishments of you and of Rasha and Secretary Clinton and now Secretary Kerry. I think those have been important investments and important efforts. So on procurement reform, which I guess we're now calling local solutions, the problem with that was, and this is the Busan thing in particular that I'm getting at that this is where I think when people ask the question, well, why are we doing it? Why is AID doing this? Some of this, my view has always been, well, some of what's driving this is the post-Busan local ownership discussion. Well, but the local ownership discussion at Busan was driven largely by us in advance of that because we firmly believe that if you're going to have sustainable development, you have to build local capacity that, you know, remember what 30% says. 30% says that 30% of our resources in aid, 30% of our investments in development are going to go to the countries themselves. Now, if you thought about that stepping back, you'd say 30%, that's crazy. You know, the goal is 100%. The goal is to put people in charge of their own development agenda. So we're talking about moving from 11% basically to 30% in the space of about four or five years. Now, remember what that 30% is. It's not just to governments, and it is certainly not in budgetary support for governments. It is empowering ministries that we have previously looked at and determined are capable, are not corrupt, are able to implement programs, and saying, if you implement a program, in many cases, we'll pay you back for the costs as you document them. It's also working with local civil society groups, and it's working with business community in those countries. And so again, I don't believe that this was a conscious choice of ours. I think it was a reaction to the reality on the ground that sustainable development was not occurring in too many times when we were depending upon outside groups to do it. And secondly, the fact that these countries would no longer accept this. Now let me say, I think we're all in this world. And I go and I talk to my private contractor friends and I do mean friends, because many of them I've worked with for years and years, and they are excellent at what they do, and they're dedicated. And I talk to my NGO friends, and I'm about to be an NGO person again. So I have to acknowledge that I have the greatest amount of respect for them, and they tell me that we have to all adapt to this new world. And again, if you're thinking about the private contractor side of this, do you really want to compete for a very small percentage of that $30 billion that we were talking about, or do you want to compete for that $8 trillion, which is domestic resource mobilization, which is the resources that these countries have? And so if we can use those resources effectively, we're going to encourage more development, and it's going to be better for American business than anything else we can do. Let's talk about some of the inclusive development agendas. I want to talk specifically about youth and development policy. And we mentioned Nicole Goldin's here, and she's with us at CSIS. And thank you, Bill Reese, our partner with this. IYF and Hilton have been great partners in helping set up a youth security and development initiative. Talk a little bit about the youth strategy at CSIS. I'm sorry, at AID, please. Yeah, you can presumably talk. I'm going to ask Nicole to do that later, and talk about what it means for AID. There are two ways to look at young people in developing countries and the demographics that we face. The first, which is I think the traditional way we've looked at this, is this is dangerous. You've got a huge youth population that is potentially facing unemployment, that is facing low growth rates, that has weak education. And the sense is that they are a drag on the society, both economically and socially, and that they're really dangerous politically, because all it's going to take is a Fode Sanco, or a Jonas Savimbi, or another terrorist or guerrilla fighter with a vision of instant empowerment, and they will go running after that person. And that's one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is this is a tremendous resource. The very fact that you have young populations, and you're going to be able to reduce that dependency ratio, because of these people entering into society, if you can train them, if you can create jobs for them, if you can give them a place in society in a sense for a purpose, then you can immediately chalk up 3% growth rate. You just chalk it up. It's going to happen on top of anything else that you're trying to do. And so that is the basic principle behind what we're trying to do. It is also a recognition of something that I always say, which is nothing about them without them. It's a recognition that if you involve young people themselves in their own development drives, then you can use the contributions they can make. And this is how it impacts on the larger question of inclusive development. Because I think too frequently, we have gone back to that image of development is 6% growth or 8% growth. And the reality is that Egypt experienced 6% and 8% and 10% growth rates throughout the entire last decade. But they didn't create jobs. They didn't create equitable distribution of that income. They didn't keep corruption under control. And they didn't create housing and health care and education. And the result was a very costly, if necessary, social revolution. And so it's not about simple growth rates, which are necessary, but certainly not sufficient. It's about involving marginalized groups in the development effort, not only as beneficiaries, but as planners, as implementers, as contributors. And so that means women. And that means people with disabilities. And that means young people. And it means the LGBT community. Thank God for the Supreme Court. I'm a political pointee. I can say that. It means involving indigenous populations in this exercise. It means involving religious and ethnic minorities in the exercise. And if you think that those are sort of marginalized or special interest groups, the groups I just mentioned represent 75% of the population in the countries we're talking about. So this is essential to draw on the full contributions of all the actors in this process. Let's talk about the private sector in development. We've done quite a lot of work here at CSIS. We had a bipartisan council that we put together looking at. And we have the report outside, our shared opportunity. You were working on, I said earlier, you were an Africanist before Africa was cool, but I think you were also building public-private partnerships before public-private partnerships were cool. You were Ambassador Angola several years back. And that may be right. But talk a little bit about when you were at Ambassador Angola, talk a little bit about the conversation you had with Chevron at the time. So this was in the middle of an interregnum where we finally had brought peace to Angola. Unfortunately, it unraveled, and we had another two or three years of conflict before it permanently ended. But this was the period of 1995 to 1998. And in the middle of all of this conflict, offshore oil was booming. And frankly, it didn't, from a security standpoint, you were pretty safe operating offshore. And so one of the things I did was to work with a number of American oil companies to win contracts. And thank you for that. And it's part of my job as an American ambassador to create opportunities for American business. I was very proud to do so. And then these companies would have signing bonuses that they were required to pay into social responsibility funds. And they were to manage those funds. And so I went to Chevron. And I said, you're good at getting oil out of the ground. You're not a development agency. We know how to do development. So we want to partner with you to use those resources effectively on the ground. And it worked. We invested in a number of important projects in health and education, both for the populations of Chevron, but also for the broader population in the country. And I think it set the groundwork for what we see now in public-private partnerships. But as we were talking about before, I actually think I was wrong in that context because the notion that the US government does development and Chevron doesn't do development is just crazy. Chevron, as well as other American companies, international companies, they do development every bit as much as official development agencies. And I was mentioning before, we give $30 billion in investments in developing countries. The private sector has a trillion dollars. And so I firmly believe now that this whole movement away from corporate social responsibility into incorporating development concepts into the business model is the way to go. And we're working on that sort of left and right. One new version of that was the Global Alliance for Food Security, where at the G8 last year, President Obama launched an initiative whereby we are as governments putting forward some resources. But what we're mostly doing is using our convening authority to urge developing countries to liberalize certain trade laws and investment laws to rationalize the process. And we've got three and a half billion dollars worth of private sector investment going into that space. What's fabulous as well is we now have a billion dollars coming from the NGO community and great tribute to Sam Worthington for his work with Interaction to generate those kinds of resources and now they're doing it in other areas as well. And so this is the new model. The new model is not, you know, we do development in governments and you guys just pony up the resources. I also think that the real advantage to this new approach is that we used it, we've done 1,600 public-private partnerships at AID. We're sort of like the global leader in this space. But up until relatively recently, I believe we just slapped a public-private partnership label on too many of our relationships with the private sector and we said it's immune from the tough standards of monitoring and evaluation. This is sort of gift money we're working with. This is the house money. And so we don't need to apply those same standards. And that's simply not accurate because the administrative costs and the actual resources involved are development assistance. And so we do need those tough standards to apply. And I think we're doing it more and more. You just released the Democracy Rights and Governance Strategy on Monday. Some people would say that the administration shied away from democracy promotion because that was something the Bush administration used to. Is that an accurate criticism? I'm not sure I agree with it, but I'd like to hear your view on that first and then second. The strategy has some references to the links with economic growth, but if you could talk a little bit about how you see the links between democracy governance and economic growth. Yeah, I don't think we've shied away from democracy promotion. I think if you look at what we've done in terms of the, for example, the open government partnership, we've linked now 50, 60, 70 governments around the world who are committed to democratic reform to move ahead. I think our spending in this area has remained robust. I do believe that we needed to, and including at AID, sort of to reform and rethink how we were doing support in democracy, human rights, and governance, because too frequently in the past, and this is where our DRG strategy now moves, too frequently in the past, we sort of saw this as a question of what institutions would we build? What, you know, it was, we have to support the electoral commissions or the legislatures or civil society groups or the judiciaries, and that presented a very stilted approach towards democracy promotion. It did not recognize the interlinkages that are at play here, and so you build up a judiciary, but if you haven't built up a policing system and a penal system, then what have you accomplished? If you haven't created the concept of citizen's participation, the concept of accountability, the concepts of human rights and transparency, then these institutions on their own can accomplish very little, and so that's really the approach of the new strategy, to say what is it that we're really trying to promote, and again, it is human rights and accountability and citizen's participation and transparency, and I think one of the exciting things that has happened is the application of a lot of those techniques and science and technology innovations that we were talking about before in this space. So we have a grand challenge that we've implemented, which is called Making All Voices Count, which is coming up with some very exciting initiatives in order to hold governments accountable through new technologies at play, and I think this is particularly important given that we are facing a situation which is really reprehensible around the world of closing space for civil society. We're seeing it everywhere, and it is, in essence, it is the empire striking back in this space. It is scary to me. It's represented by what's going on in Egypt or represented by what went on in Russia or Bolivia or a wide variety of countries. In Bobway, there are institutions out there that just track this and they report a real decline in this space, and so we have to find new ways and new techniques of empowering civil society to hold their governments accountable, and that's one of the efforts in this space. Let me actually shift gears for a second. I'm just cognizant of the time and I want to make sure we get focused. I have just two more things I want to get out. You tell a wonderful story about, I don't know which military leader came to AID to talk about Afghanistan, but you worked at the International Crisis Group, you worked in some very difficult countries, so the intersection of conflict and development, and if you just share that anecdote and just talk a little bit about the evolution of development at the intersection of development and conflict over since 9-11. Sure, and I think Afghanistan is probably the best example of that, and because we are short of time, I'm gonna truncate this dramatically. I believe that with the anticipated withdrawal of American forces, or at least combat forces from Afghanistan by the end of next year, that what we do in that country for the next 18 months is very, very significant. Meaning AID and state government. No, what we as a government do, and we have three basic tools here. I would argue that the development tool is the most important. So we are trying to build up the defense capability of the Afghans, building up their police and their military capacity, that's very important. It is very important that we do the diplomatic effort to try to bring the Taliban into the tent and to work out some structures there. But for me, the biggest assurance of security in a post-2014 Afghanistan is gonna be a continuation of what we've seen for the past decade. It is truly amazing, and it is the unwritten story. Life expectancy in Afghanistan has increased in the last decade by 15 years. You used to die at 47 in Afghanistan just a decade ago. Now it's 62. We have decreased maternal and infant mortality by 60%. We have three million girls in school right now. We had zero a decade ago. And for me, the biggest assurance that we're going to be able to leave a stable Afghanistan is the commitment of people in Afghanistan to their government and their political structure and their economic and their social structures. And we can only achieve that if we maintain the progress and affect people's lives. The quote you're talking about was, Admiral Stravidis, the head of NATO, who came to us at our mission director's conference and he said, you know, we're not gonna fight our way out of Afghanistan. We're gonna develop our way out of Afghanistan. I think that's right. Absolutely. I wanna talk about interagency relations depending on how you count it. We've got two dozen agencies that do development. Is AID still the lead agency on development in the United States government? Yes. And okay, and tell me. Oh, you want more? Yeah, I do want more. Yes, I do. But also, could you talk a little bit, Don, you've been at the State Department. You've been at AID. Could you talk about the evolution of that relationship over time? I think there's been, sometimes there's been tension. Sometimes there hasn't been, you're able to bridge both of those worlds. Well, not only have I been able to bridge them but Secretary Clinton did and now Secretary Kerry is doing that. And I think with the QDDR in particular, there was a recognition that development and diplomacy as well as defense represent the three pillars that are necessary. I say we're the lead agency in part because if I say that we're spending 30 billion as a government, 20 billion of that is being spent by USAID. We are driving the process. But that is not to deny the absolutely vital role that State Department and HHS and CDC and PEPFAR and... We have too many agencies doing this work? No, we don't. Because this is a whole of government exercise now, just as development is a whole of society exercise. And I want to draw on the capability of the Department of Justice to go in and work with police forces and to train local prosecutors. And I want Treasury to go in and help financial systems to develop properly. And I want CDC to be working with local labs to address issues that matter very, very much to us including pandemic diseases in the space. So no, I would never argue that. I think it is a situation where we have to work cooperatively. We have to identify who is in the lead. We have to identify what the problem is and which government agency has the best capacity to address that problem. We are the lead agency in part because we are present virtually everywhere in developing countries as opposed to other government agencies. The other thing is that we implement a lot of the programs that these agencies provide including PEPFAR where virtually two thirds of the spending for PEPFAR actually goes through the US Agency for International Development. The relationship with the State Department, I believe, has frankly never been better. I think the question of USAID being completely independent is off the table. I think the question of USAID being subsumed into the State Department like another bureau is off the table. We've got those issues resolved. Those were essentially taken care of by the QDDR as well as Secretary Clinton's vision that AID was one of the most important tools she had in promoting American interests abroad including our diplomatic interests, our security interests. I think there's, if I can just expand on that a second, I think there's finally a recognition within our government as well as within our Congress and American people as well of the importance of development. And I think it reflects itself in our values. We want to live in a world that's democratic and peaceful and prosperous. It's also our economic interests. There's this amazing statistic, 13 of the top 18 fastest growing markets for US products are in countries that receive or have received USAID assistance. And that means exports, that means jobs, that means investment opportunities. But I also think people get the connection with our national security because countries that are peaceful and prosperous don't tend to traffic in drugs, in people or in weapons. They don't send refugees massively across borders or oceans. They don't transmit pandemic diseases. They don't harbor terrorists or pirates and they don't require American troops on the ground. And I think all of that is in our national security interests and I think the American people get it. I agree. Let's open up for questions. I know there are a lot of thoughtful people and I want to make sure that we have time for some of these thoughtful folks to get their Q&A out. George Ingram, please. Microphone? Their microphone? If not, George, just stand up. Sol, do you have a microphone? Is there a microphone? I'm George Ingram. And transparency over services policy was a model of how you have a transparent open process. It's on my desk right this second. Are you going to sign it before you leave? And I got to go back because I do intend to sign it before I leave. Well, is there any? No, I'm sorry. I've got to go. OK. He's leaving right now to do the right, right? Is the education model, is the urban services a one-off? No. Or is there any evidence that there's direction from the leadership of AID that we are going to have a more transparent policy process and we're going to see that down the road? And then on the data side, the strong commitments to IOTI and the dashboard, the implementation has been slow, not impressive. Any evidence that the White House memorandum of a month ago on open data is going to really boost that along and we'll see much more robust implementation of those. So on the first question, yes, this is where we're going from now on. I think we were open and transparent with a relatively small community in the other policies that we've adopted. And I think there's a recognition that that was not the way to go. The urban policy, we got over 100 responses from civil society groups, from business groups, from foreign governments, from universities, and it has improved dramatically the quality of that report. And I think we get it. I mean, this is the world as it is coming. We actually held up a new policy that we were supposed to be releasing this week on our LGBT strategy, in part because it did not have that same degree of transparency. And so I would have loved to be able to sign that before I left. And frankly, I think it's very good. But it is not the product of a transparent process. So we decided we're going back and spending another two to three months to truly consult with the global community on that policy. The one thing I would say in terms of policies themselves is I think you're going to see a real slow down in the issuance of these policies as we move ahead. I mean, I actually have the list of the policies that we've adopted in the last two years. And they are the policy framework, youth and development, DRG, countering violent extremism, climate change, child marriage, counter-trafficking in persons, monitoring and valuation, gender equality, education, and women, peace, and security. Not a whole lot left to do. So I think you're probably not going to see us focus as much on the adoption of the policies as on the implementation side at this point. On the question of our transparency, I understand the concerns that you're expressing. I wish we were going a little bit quicker in this space, but I don't think it's as dire as you've said. I think we have, with the dashboard and with our commitments to IATI, put more data available to researchers in the development community than just about anyone in this space. We still have a ways to go. I acknowledge that. And we still have to make sure that researchers can use the data because I understand that it is not in the form that a lot of people would have liked. But this is a process that is continuing along the way. We got reasonable grades from transparency groups in the last exercise. I think you were at the program where we, as government agencies, were debating over who had the best record and we committed back and forth to do important new steps in this space so that competitive process works in government as well as the private sector. And yes, I mean, I know Raj Shah is firmly committed to this exercise and it will continue. The gentleman here in the second row. Saul, if you could get me. My name is Asmukh Shah from Business Times. Last week, Secretary of State, Mr. John Carey, took a big delegation to India for US-India Strategic Dialogue, in which US-AID administrator, Mr. Rajeev Shah, participated in a big way. Now, the India-US relations are increasing so rapidly and US-AID is playing a role, especially for social and welfare, that the education can use some sort of light on that subject because US-AID is increasing a lot of funding also in that kind of activity. Oh, absolutely. So we were proud to participate in that summit and I think what was most important there was the work we're doing in encouraging clean energy. And we sponsored nine new partnerships to encourage clean energy operations and I know the government of India has come out with some important steps in that space. Obviously, the president with his announcement a few days ago has highlighted that area as well. We also were looking at a number of enterprise funds that we will use to encourage development not only in India but throughout South Asia. And perhaps most importantly is the cooperation that I was referring to before where we're working with India to learn the lessons of Indian development to transmit them throughout the world. And so as the world's biggest democracy and the world's oldest democracy, I guess that's the way we refer to it. We are working together to talk about the principles of electoral politics and we're working with IFIS and other groups to extend the techniques that we're adopting in our two countries. We're working on taking the lessons of food security promotion and feed the future together to Africa and we've got a variety of countries working in there. As I think you know, last year, we at the Child Survival Summit, the United States, India were shoulder to shoulder leading that process along with UNICEF and a few other countries in order to reaffirm our commitment to eliminate preventable child death within 20 years around the world. And we now have some 170 countries around the world who have signed on to that pledge to make tangible steps forward. And so I just think the partnership between the United States and India both to encourage development within India but also to encourage development around the world is a growth industry. And we did a report here at CSIS on strategic foreign assistance transitions looking at countries like India, Russia, and I know over time you're gonna be closing a number of aid missions and one of the thoughts we put on the table was to say how do we leave something behind? AIDs had a history of doing that, of leaving behind endowed foundations in places like Costa Rica or Portugal or various sorts of other sorts of connectivity in places like South Korea or Tunisia. It's certainly down the road, we're gonna wanna transition the relationship we have with India in this sort of a direction. There's a woman back here in the green sweater. Thank you, my name is Mindy Reiser with Global Peace Services, USA, and NGO. I've had the opportunity to work in Central Asia and the caucuses with AID projects. My question is about the Millennium Challenge Corporation and you talked about the whole of government. How do you see that relationship evolving? And let me just, there's a woman also who are two over, if you could also get that and we'll group them together world bank style, so. Okay, thank you. Lindsay Carter from Foreign Agricultural Service, one of the two dozen other government agencies doing development work. This pertains to the gentleman's question as far as this concept of graduating countries. As an agency we're required reduced budgets, we have to choose our priority countries and we toy around with the idea of graduating countries, countries that while looking developed have some natural, a lot of natural resources such as Angola, still have a lot of inequality. How do we deal with both implementing in those countries but also making the argument to the US public that there's still necessary work to be done in countries such as this? Let me, I want to take advantage of Nakazawa-san being here who's the JICA representative and Sol if you could get him and then that will be the last question. Thank you Dan. Keiichiro Nakazawa from JICA. First of all on behalf of JICA, I would like to thank Don, Mr. Simba that you hugely contributed to international development and also the enhancing the relationship between the US AID and JICA, so thank you very much. My question is a little bit to the previous question. President Obama in his State of the Union address mentioned about joining the RIS to ending poverty goals and President Kim of the World Bank also said to end the poverty by 2030. And if we look at the poverty map, India even though there is a very impressive development still have the 4 million, no 400 million in extreme poverty and fragile states, many of them are middle income countries still have a lot of extreme poverty population. So how US AID or US government need to shift your resources to combat this poverty and achieving the ending poverty role? That's excellent. So to begin with on MCC, we have a very close partnership with MCC all around the world in a number of countries. We are the implementing body for the MCC resources that are spent on the ground. MCC has a number of capabilities that US AID doesn't have, the capacity to do longer term compacts, the capacity to focus on a few key constraints to growth, the capacity to do infrastructure development, the capacity to apply very strict metrics that go beyond the strict development area and to hold governments accountable in that space. We have much to learn from MCC and we are doing that. We are making a lot of our grants more sustainable. We are applying tougher conditionality to a lot of what we're doing. We are looking increasingly at the constraints to growth model, especially under the partnership for growth in the Philippines and Tanzania and Ghana and El Salvador. So we are in a lot of ways working collaboratively together and it is a very good relationship. I think we very much respect the work that MCC is doing. So I think I'll leave it at that. In terms of the question of graduation, graduation isn't simply a matter of a per capita income level getting to $1,800 or $2,400. We don't apply an IDA type principle there. We look at a wide variety of features, including political development, including the maturity of an institution within government, the finance ministry, the treasury, et cetera. We look at indeed how income is distributed. We look at poverty measures in that country. And the way we structure our development, however, in a middle income country, and this is partially addressing your question as well, would be very different from in another country. So you look at an Angola, for example. And we do have an assistance program in Angola. But we are not looking at supplanting government budgets. We're working with civil society organizations. We're working on democracy promotion to hold the government accountable to the people so the resources can be most effectively used. We're looking at filling gaps in that system. We're looking at our convening authority to draw partners together. We're looking at our capacity to reduce risk for private investors to go in and to take some risks ourselves because, frankly, the US government is capable of taking calculated risks that private companies or others might not be willing to take. And so I really do believe that that prioritization can be easily explained to the American people. And we have, frankly, not had a lot of resistance about maintaining programs in those types of countries. That said, we are getting out of a wide variety of countries around the world. We've just closed our mission in Hungary. We closed our mission in Montenegro. We're closing missions throughout Latin America because we do believe those countries have achieved either a sustainable rate of growth or, in some cases, because they've told us to leave, which is not the most pleasant process. So I always carry around the president's quote with me because it was, in effect, the I like to treat it as my 60th birthday present because I turned 60 in March. And just before that, he agreed to use some words that we had helped him write in the State of the Union. And he said, the United States will join with our allies around the world to eliminate extreme poverty in the next two decades. And what I think is particularly significant is what he said we would do to achieve that. He said, we were going to connect more people to the global economy. We were going to empower women. We were going to give young and brightest minds new opportunities to serve. We were going to help communities to feed, empower, and educate themselves. We were going to save the world's children from preventable death. And we would realize the promise of an AIDS-free generation. So I think there was a recognition when the president said that, that you can't just go after poverty. What you have to do is create these sorts of measures, empowerment for women, eliminating child death, using the bright young minds we have out there in order to build a development system that can account for its own poverty in countries around the world. Don, thanks for your time. Thanks for your service. Please join me in thanking Don Steinberg. Thank you. Thank you.