The summer after college, I went to work on a health project in southern India.
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The first day I got there -- the furthest from home I'd ever been on my own -- I wandered into a neighboring village and met a young child. She was barefoot, dressed in muddied rags, and looked four or five-years-old. I believed I knew the face of poverty, until I saw that little girl.
I thought of that memory during this year's State of the Union address when President Barack Obama called upon our nation to join with the world in ending extreme poverty. It was an extraordinary moment, as the president set forth a vision for one of the greatest contributions to human progress in history.
The president's call presents an incredible opportunity. Today, we have new tools and approaches that enable us to achieve progress that was simply unimaginable in the past: the eradication of extreme poverty and its most devastating corollaries, including widespread hunger and preventable child death.
At the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), we are fortunate to have this mission as our vocation, and over the last five decades, we have made some important strides toward this goal, all with less than one percent of the national budget.
Many Americans believe that foreign aid represents roughly 25 percent of the national budget and ought to be cut. When they learn that it actually makes up less than one percent, they are astonished. And when you describe what we do with less than one percent -- the millions of girls we help educate or businesses we help grow -- many Americans actually believe we're not spending enough.
The truth is that development is not a big part of our national conversation, and many people simply don't realize what a difference we can make to the millions of children like the little girl I met in India. Every day, I find myself making this case, battling the perception that politics today cannot support great moral aspirations or that government cannot usher in innovative ways of achieving those goals.
But in my last three years as USAID's administrator, I've seen just the opposite. From a church in inner-city Detroit that looks after an orphanage in Ghana to the nationwide response after the Haiti earthquake, I've seen the depth of passion and support that Americans have for our work. And at a time of seemingly uncompromising politics, I've seen leaders from both sides of the aisle stand together as champions for this global task.
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