With U.S. development assistance in ruins, reinvention—not repair—is the only path forward. Painful, yes—but inevitable.
The money will return. Development remains one of the most efficient ways to reduce long-term foreign risk and open markets for U.S. products.
But when it does return, one thing must change: how the field is staffed.
For decades, USAID and its contractors have prized expertise — narrow subject mastery, country familiarity, and an alphabet of graduate degrees.
The next generation will need something else: comparativists.
Passion matters. Empathy too. And yes, the soft skills — enthusiasm, curiosity, cross-cultural fluency — those help.
But development is essentially a comparative craft.
It belongs to people who’ve walked across borders, failed in strange places, and learned to see patterns in the differences.
The best among us aren’t necessarily the most expert — they’re the most comparative. Their intellectual baggage carries stamps from places they barely remember but which had important impact on their ability to adapt good practices to local circumstances.
They know how a customs single window can change an economy because they’ve watched one fail. They’ve seen how a small regulatory reform, timed right, can open a market or save a harvest.
They carry not just experience, but perspective.
Career advice? Get your passport dirty.
And if you can’t, find another way to see beyond your own systems — read, listen, sit with people whose worlds are built differently.
Development isn’t learned in theory or taught in webinars. It’s accumulated — in airports, ministries, markets, and long nights with local partners who see things you don’t.
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