On November 21, 2013 USAID Administrator Raj Shah spoke at Brookings, saying that the End of Poverty is within our reach, and would be the top priority of the agency. Click on the image at right to download USAID’s new brochure on this subject, and click here for the full text of Shah’s remarks.

Shah outlined three areas of focus for the agency?

1. Public-private resources and innovations: “There’s this new model of development that is emerging, it still has to be proven at scale and seeing that through in agriculture and power, and understanding its application to other sectors of work will be a continued area of focus and challenge.”

2. Fragility and areas entrenched in conflict: “This focus on fragility and really understanding it, knowing how to measure fragility, understanding when you can be helpful and when you need to be cautious about making large investments in fragile environments, understanding how to fight corruption in fragile environments even as you want to make rapid gains in health and welfare.”

3. Resilience: “It is probably not possible … to end extreme poverty so long as the same very low-income communities get hit with the same major catastrophes over and over and over again, and so long as we keep providing a large amount of emergency assistance without building the core resilience … we need to do an even more focused job at delivering on the resilience agenda.”