DIL State of the Lab - Fall 2015 | Page 6

Ticora Jones: The Federal Government’s Scientist for Global Development By Anh-Thi Le Dr. Ticora V. Jones is division chief for the Higher Education Solutions Network (HESN) within USAID’s Global Development Lab. Established in 2012, the Higher Education Solutions Network harnesses the ingenuity and worldclass expertise available at universities to develop innovative solutions to global development challenges. DIL recently spoke with Dr. Jones to gather her views on the role of universities in development, working in the public sector, and diversity in social impact. It has been three years since USAID launched the Higher Education Solutions Network (HESN). What have you learned from HESN and how can USAID best work with universities to further global development? When we first launched HESN, we were excited that universities were already playing innovative and novel roles in international development. For example, we knew about faculty and researchers creating sensors to monitor effectiveness and use of technologies in global development, such as those University of Portland’s at SWEETLab, and we believed that universities were creating innovations that could be radically transformative if they had additional support and partners. Our challenge was to see how university innovations could be made more visible in international development and beyond the immediate academic community. We’ve learned that HESN can play a role in facilitating connections between emerging university-based innovations and practitioners. Universities are unique places where individuals are encouraged and have the opportunity to explore, evolve, and iterate. This drive, coupled with a strong need from NGOs, development organizations, and implementers to have impact, has the potential for creating many pathways to sustainable socioeconomic progress. PAGE 6 We’ve also learned that in facilitating partnerships and bridging the ingenuity of universities with on-the-ground implementation, communication and relationship building are crucial. Creating a bridge between universities and other actors, be they NGOs or community or government organizations, requires ever-expanding relationship building to introduce new concepts, thoughts, and ideas. We’ve gained valuable lessons from development projects being facilitated by universities in regard to how a university and its partners establish a project and transmit what they’ve learned. In a sense, we have moved beyond the notion of seeing how impactful an innovation is to think