The Obama administration recently announced the nomination of Gayle Smith to serve as administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development. It’s an important job and one that is key to ensuring that U.S. development priorities continue in the final two years of the Obama administration.
Smith would bring a wealth of experience to USAID — experience she’ll need to meet both the agency’s challenges and the world’s most urgent issues.
For many of us in the development community, it’s obvious that empowering women and girls is key to ending poverty and building more peaceful and equitable societies around the globe. The research proves it. And since 2012, when USAID released its Gender Equality and Female Empowerment Policy, the agency has taken great steps to develop real leadership on gender equality, expand resources for gender programming and greatly increase staff capacity. The requirement of gender integration in program design, implementation and monitoring and evaluation has also been a step forward.
About the authors
Melissa Kaplan
Melissa Kaplan is a senior manager for policy and government affairs at Women Thrive Worldwide. She brings deep experience within the international development community and previously served as advocacy manager at InterAction, where she managed the InterAction CEO Task Force on Aid Reform and lobbied on issues including foreign assistance and appropriations. She previously held the position of deputy director of government relations at Citizens for Global Solutions
Christine Hart
Christine Hart is a senior manager for policy and government affairs at Women Thrive Worldwide where leads the organization's work on gender-based violence. Chrissy represents Women Thrive as a co-chair of the Coalition to End Violence Against Women and Girls Globally, where her work focuses on efforts to promote policies and programs for gender-based violence prevention and response at the U.S. and U.N. levels to ensure that it reflects the realities and perspectives of women and girls on the ground.
