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TACLOBAN, Eastern Sumar Province, Republic of the Philippines (Nov. 20, 2013) Sailors assigned to the aircraft carrier USS George Washington (CVN 73) and Marines assigned to the 3d Marine Expeditionary Brigade load boxes of supplies into a U.S. Marine Corps MV-22 Osprey from Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron (VMM) 262 to be airlifted to nearby villages in support of Operation Damayan. The George Washington Carrier Strike Group in coordination with Joint Task Force 505 personnel is assisting the Philippine government in ongoing efforts in response to super Typhoon Haiyan. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Trevor Welsh/Released)

Source: devex

The U.S. Global Development Lab is an innovation hub inside America’s foreign aid agency, which is tasked with taking “smart risks” that can unlock new and innovative approaches to tackling development challenges. Over the past few years, one of the challenges the lab has taken on is the U.S. Agency for International Development’s lack of options for deploying its people to insecure and conflict-affected environments.

For years USAID has struggled with a conundrum: to contribute to U.S. national security objectives the agency needs to be able to operate in places that present national security risks; but a culture of risk aversion — which has intensified since the 2012 attacks on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya — often restricts U.S. civilian officials to capital cities where their security can be better guaranteed. That tendency to confine U.S. civilians to secure areas — sometimes referred to as “fortressification” — creates distance between USAID personnel and the communities they strive to serve.

The gap widens when those communities are located “outside the wire,” in places where violent extremism, instability, and state fragility pose additional risks.

In Feb. 2018, the Global Development Lab quietly released a series of reports it had commissioned from the Frontier Design Group to undertake research and development on new approaches to countering violent extremism

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