Legendary tennis player and U.S. Army veteran Arthur Ashe once reflected that true heroism is, as he put it, "not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost." Today, on Veterans Day, we honor that spirit of service - celebrating those who have worked so hard, and sacrificed so much, to protect their communities and their country.
Today, as historic levels of conflict are driving unprecedented levels of humanitarian need, coordination with the military is particularly vital to our development work, and veterans often play a critical role in advancing that cooperation. USAID first introduced the Mission Civilian-Military Coordinator (MC2) position in 2017 to align essential humanitarian and development programming with our colleagues at DoD. We now have 120 MC2s across our Missions and Country Offices worldwide, helping DoD and USAID work together to coordinate crisis response and advance development goals.
In Djibouti, for instance, USAID and DoD worked together to support primary education - with DOD rehabilitating 80 percent of the country's primary schools in areas outside the capital, and USAID then providing hundreds of thousands of teaching and learning materials to these schools to help children learn to read - helping to increase the percentage of second graders reading at a minimum level of proficiency from 20 to 46 percent. In Vietnam, DoD and USAID are working to overcome the legacy of war by coordinating the remediation of soil contaminated with dioxin, the toxic chemical byproduct of Agent Orange. Veterans have been essential in both identifying opportunities for collaborations like these and bringing together teams across Agencies to make them happen.
