Shah, 39, earned a medical degree from University of Pennsylvania and a master’s in public health from Wharton. He’s worked for Al Gore and Bill Gates, for whom he ran a multi-billion dollar vaccination program. Now he runs an organization that has a $22 billion budget, 8,000 employees and an unfortunate degree of modesty.

USAID launched three grand challenges for development – to save lives at birth, get all children reading, and power agriculture through clean energy. We’ve also created new funding mechanisms that will help bring new ideas to scale like our Development Innovation Ventures program, which is supporting new solutions to prevent electoral fraud and to expand access to credit for underserved populations.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID), aimed at spreading American values all over the world, has started packing up in Russia early this week. Moscow was the initiator of closing down the instrument of American “soft power”, referring to Russian laws.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will speak at the 2012 International AIDS Conference in Washington...With the theme of "Turning the Tide Together," AIDS 2012 aims to increase global awareness through convening a group of scientific experts, community leaders, and policy leaders.

In these cases of chronic crisis, recurring shocks erase development gains and set local populations back into urgent need over and over again. With many in the Sahel still struggling to recover from the region's last food crisis in 2010, they now face a new crisis of food access.

The United States, while maintaining an excellent exchange program, needs to focus more efforts and resources toward empowering young people from the U.S. to not just experience foreign cultures but to engage in dialogue about pressing global issues.

After agreeing to underwrite a local Pakistan version of the ubiquitous children’s television show, Sesame Street, USAID officials pulled the funding for this project after corruption rumours began to appear in local newspapers.

More broadly, the assumption underlying most efforts at public diplomacy seems to be the belief that anti-Americanism around the world is a failure of marketing. If we just do a better job of selling what we do around the world ... then Pakistanis won't mind our launching drone strikes on their territory and will give us a free pass when we kill a bunch of border guards by accident.