Devex Newswire: Peace Corps’ new leader inherits an agency in limbo

Carol Spahn’s Peace Corps voyage has taken her from volunteering in Romania to dancing in Malawi. Now, as the Peace Corps’ new executive director, she’ll need all her skills to shepherd an agency emaciated by the COVID-19 pandemic and still reeling from scandal. Also in today’s edition: Africa CDC wants to help the continent unite around a digital health strategy, and humanitarians try to navigate parenthood and perpetual crisis. At peace with change When Carol Spahn first served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Bucharest, Romania was still recovering from the dark days of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship. Nearly 30 years later, she takes the reins of the Peace Corps at a time when the storied U.S. agency is recovering from the dark days of the pandemic and past scandals. As COVID-19 spread, volunteers were pulled out, leaving the Peace Corps — along with its identity, and a $430.5 million annual budget — in jeopardy. If Spahn is worried, though, she’s not letting on, my colleague Adva Saldinger reports. Even though the corps has been through “a profoundly disruptive, pivotal period in history. … It is just the beginning of a long and exciting journey, not just to rebuild, but also to reshape the Peace Corps,” said Spahn, who helped oversee the return of some 900 former and new volunteers to 46 countries last year. Former colleagues tell Adva that Spahn has the chops to rehabilitate the agency. She may even have fun doing it — just like she has throughout her career. Arthur Flanagan, her now-retired country director in Romania, recalls Spahn getting up on stage at a Temptations concert in Romania during her Peace Corps service. But we may not get a full picture of her adventures. At her swearing-in ceremony, she joked that video footage of her dancing in Malawi is “off limits.” Read: Once a volunteer, new Peace Corps chief will 'reset' atrophied agency Tech team effort Everyone has to have a digital strategy nowadays, whether you’re a blogger, company, or government. And that’s especially true when you’re an entire continent working to use technology to improve the health of hundreds of millions of people. At least 41 African countries have digital health strategies, but as my colleague Sara Jerving reports, some of these blueprints are so ambitious that they’re unrealistic — and thus largely gathering dust. So countries have turned to the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention for help. The agency has been fleshing out its own digital health strategy over the last eight months, and now wants to impart what it’s learned to create a “strong pan-African digital health community,” Jean Philbert Nsengimana, the chief digital health adviser for Africa CDC, tells Sara. A top priority is to make sure that every health facility, front-line worker, and patient is connected to the internet by 2030. Nsengimana says that’s the only way the continent can achieve universal health coverage — but funding, digital literacy, and data silos remain barriers. That’s why Nsengimana wants to build “a coalition of the willing around some of these ideas.” “If we work together, we stand a much better chance to move faster,” he says. Read: Africa CDC aims to be more tech-savvy with new digital health strategy + Join us and hear more from Nsengimana on our next Twitter Spaces conversation on the state of digital connectivity and why it’s hard to close the digital divide, happening on Jan. 27. Work-life balance Raising a baby while maintaining a career is no easy feat. But when your job entails being far from home, on the front lines of war, disaster, poverty, and basically 24/7 crises, hard doesn’t even begin to describe it. “Being a parent in the humanitarian sector is different and difficult,” says Riya Yuyada, co-founder of Crown the Woman, which focuses on the rights of women and girls in South Sudan. Yuyada talked to Devex contributor Rebecca Root about those difficulties, including her daily 3 a.m. start to work for a few hours before her son wakes up. “It’s about taking care of everyone else and putting yourself last,” she tells Rebecca. The strains can have serious repercussions. Some women have concealed pregnancies for fear contracts won’t be renewed, others have limited themselves to one child, while others have quit the field altogether, according to those Rebecca interviewed — including one who spoke as she breastfed. But some organizations are trying to keep parents from leaving by offering, among other things, more flexibility and better pay and benefits. Those kinds of services require money, though, which is why Thomas Arcaro — author of “Aid Worker Voices” — says donors need to chip in. “There needs to be, written into grants, money for line item budgets for care and feeding and education of the workforce,” he says, calling funding agencies “too myopically focused on bang for the buck.” Read: Humanitarians are struggling as parents. How employers can do more (Career) + Not a Devex Career Account member yet? Start your 15-day free trial now to read the piece. Your trial also lets you join the Devex Career Event on Jan. 27 on how to optimize your CV for global development roles. Old standbys The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to banish the federal right to abortion continues to reverberate in the United States and abroad. But Chris Purdy, the president and CEO of DKT International, argues that reproductive rights aren’t in as bad shape as many presume. “Ironically, the overturn of Roe v. Wade in the U.S. created so much press that it has likely galvanized millions of women around the world to learn about the existence of abortion pills, an outcome that had eluded many of us working in abortion care (thanks for that!),” he writes in an op-ed for Devex. He also says that instead of searching for the next shiny new treatment in reproductive health, we should double down on proven strategies such as abortion pills and tackling censorship that limits information about contraceptives. These strategies, he says, have been impressively effective, reducing fertility by 50% globally over the past 70 years. Opinion: On reproductive health in 2023 — stay the course, it’s working In other news Police say they have caught the mastermind behind the murders of a Brazilian activist and British journalist in the Amazon rainforest last June. [The New York Times] UNICEF has issued a call for increased support to ensure learning opportunities for children in Ukraine, where almost a year of war has hampered education for more than five million children. [UN News] Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema has appealed for prompt debt restructuring from international creditors to aid the country’s economic recovery. [Reuters] Sign up to Newswire for an inside look at the biggest stories in global development.