USAID's Higher Education Solutions Network (HESN) Summer 2014 Internship

The USAID Office of Science and Technology’s Higher Education Solutions Network (HESN) is seeking opportunities to engage students from their partner universities more closely with USAID.  In the summer of 2014, the office will offer the first HESN Summer Internship Program at USAID. 

The HESN program is a set of cooperative agreements with seven top universities designed to harness the ingenuity and passion of university students, researchers, and faculty to develop innovative solutions to global development challenges.

Each HESN Development Lab has a distinct focus:

• The College of William & Mary’s AidData Center for Development Policy is enabling the international development community to more effectively target, coordinate, deliver, and evaluate aid investments though geospatial mapping.

• University of California, Berkeley’s Development Impact Lab is improving the way universities design technology for development and apply it on a large scale in fields including energy, health, information technology, and communications.

• Duke University’s Social Entrepreneurship Accelerator at Duke and the International Partnership for Innovative Healthcare Delivery find successful innovators in health care and help them expand.

• Makerere University’s ResilientAfrica Network, anchored in Uganda, works with universities in Ethiopia, Ghana and South Africa to find innovative local solutions to overcome the shocks and stresses of poverty, conflict, displacement, disease and drought.

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads 2 programs - the Comprehensive Initiative on Technology Evaluation is designing a system for evaluating technological solutions to development challenges.  The International Development Innovation Network is linking local innovators around the world who are using technology to address issues facing people living in poverty.

• Michigan State University’s, Global Center for Food Systems Innovation addresses critical pressures on the world’s food supply by creating, testing and enabling the expansion of solutions.

• Texas A&M University’s ConDev will inform practitioners how to design development programs with a better chance of building peace in conflict-prone countries.

For more information on HESN, please visit: http://www.usaid.gov/hesn.