Good morning all, and welcome to Bangkok and the Scaling for Impact Forum!  And a special thanks to all our esteemed panelists, presenters, and participants for joining us.

This is a wonderful opportunity to engage with lots of smart folks on the major barriers and opportunities for scaling-up promising innovations, to help us all better address development challenges and deliver stronger results.

Over the next two days, we encourage you to share your insights and experiences in understanding the complex ecosystems involved in scaling-up innovations - including the actors, relationships, activities, and conditions.

And this event is also part of Global Partnerships Week, which kicks off today in Washington, DC with a partnerships forum hosted by the State Department, USAID and Concordia, and with satellite events like this one in other countries.  It celebrates the important role that public-private partnerships play in advancing diplomacy and development around the world.

Innovation has been important for USAID since its inception, and it is great to see the renewed emphasis on this today, and in particular, on identifying scalable innovations to accelerate progress.  Thinking back to earlier days, it recalls the rich analysis done to better understand adoption of new agricultural technologies, and to identify how that information can help to create conditions more conducive to agricultural growth.  And those studies showed that we need to know something not only about the innovative technologies, but also about the people who we hope will use them.  Understanding scaling is a multidisciplinary endeavor.

As part of USAID’s renewed focus on innovation, the Agency launched its Global Development Lab (greetings!), which seeks to produce and scale breakthrough development solutions to reach more of the people who need them most, as rapidly and as cheaply as possible.

For example, in sub-Saharan Africa, the Lab is working to bring drought-resistant maize to scale, to improve food security, resilience, and incomes for tens of millions of farmers.

And the Lab is working to scale a pilot project in Nepal that developed a gel disinfectant called chlorhexidine, which can reduce neonatal mortality and save thousands of lives when applied to newborn babies’ umbilical cords.

Millions of farmers, and thousands of lives, just in these two examples: that’s the kind of goal that brings us together.

Partnering is a core part of USAID’s mission.  We know solving the most intractable development challenges requires the talent, expertise, resources and assets of the public, private and nonprofit sectors, all.

Since 2001 USAID has helped build more than 1,500 alliances with more than 3,500 partner organizations, leveraging more than $20 billion in public and private funds.

For example, USAID's Partnering to Accelerate Entrepreneurship (or PACE) Initiative, has partnered with over 20 incubators, accelerators, and seed-stage impact investors, to create six public-private partnerships that will leverage $56 million in public and private investments.  These will test innovations that bridge the pioneer gap in financing for early-stage enterprises.

Another example is the recent Indian Diaspora Investment Initiative, which President Obama announced in January in New Delhi.  A collaboration between the Calvert Foundation, USAID, and social enterprise investors in India, this program will leverage the U.S.-based Indian-American diaspora to fund sustainable development across India, targeting at least $50 million from private sector financial institutions over the next year and a half.

We know partnerships are good for development and good for business, and we will continue to engage with new partners to do development better, faster, cheaper, and more sustainably.

Of course USAID in Bangkok is also very engaged:

For example, many of our programs do innovative work with mobile technology, and we helped to develop the Agency's first Mobiles for Development handbook and training.

We are also building new partnerships, including with Microsoft on the Imagine Cup, which encourages university students to design innovative solutions to development challenges.  It combines the development expertise of USAID and our implementing partners, with the technology expertise of Microsoft, and the energy and creativity of students and entrepreneurs.

And we recently launched a new partnership with Shujog’s ACTS program, to support scalable social enterprises working on key development issues in the Asia-Pacific region.  It offers funding for early-stage social enterprises to build their capacities to 1) receive and manage impact investments, and then 2) to repay this funding, once they are established.  In its first year Shujog ACTS is catalyzing over $1.5 million in impact investments to scale social enterprises that will benefit more than 54,000 people.

Today’s Scaling for Impact Forum is the third in a series of thought-leadership events that we have convened to catalyze engagement between the development and science and technology communities.

The first - in collaboration with USAID Washington and UN partners – was the Asia Urban Futures Workshop last year, focusing on the rising challenges and opportunities with rapid urbanization and climate change.

The second - our Mobiles for Development Forum held earlier this year - sought to develop a more inclusive approach to mobiles for development, to create lasting and more impactful results.

And in this third event, the Scaling for Impact Forum, we will focus on innovations, scaling, and partnerships -- all key priorities for USAID, especially in Asia - and for good reason:

While the Asia-Pacific region is the most dynamic and fastest growing in the world, it also faces major development challenges in areas like environment and natural resources management, disaster risk reduction, and infectious diseases that cross national borders.That’s a major driver in our efforts to partner with others to find ways to increase the application of science, technology, and innovation to achieve, sustain and extend positive development results in Asia. 

With these points in mind, we hope all participants in this week’s forum will be able to explore the relationships, actions and conditions necessary for promising development innovations to thrive.

We are committed to examining and testing our approaches to scaling and systems change as rigorously as possible, and to applying what we - working with you - learn over the next two days.

And I am delighted to see so many people from Asia and beyond, to explore how we can best deploy and scale innovations to end extreme poverty and enabling resilient, democratic societies to realize their full potentials.

Thanks again to you all. We are inspired by your work, and grateful for your partnership.  Today we can partner to help shape solutions in Asia and to better meet the challenges of tomorrow.  What an opportunity, and what a privilege!

See more photos and videos here: https://flic.kr/s/aHsk5AuGxE