Dr. Rajiv Shah
speaker
124 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Dr. Rajiv Shah’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
One morning I got to the office and on the other line, it was like, hi Raj, this is Hillary Clinton. And I said, oh, hi, how are you? And she said, you know, I was talking to the president and he and I would like you to run USAID. And my first week on the job, there was a massive earthquake, 8.0 in Haiti. And the president asked me to lead a global response.
And that was my, I think, sixth day on the job.
In the mid 90s, 11 and a half million kids under the age of five would die of very simple preventable diseases. And over a two year period, we actually modeled what it would cost. 20 years later, Nearly 20 million kids' lives have been saved. And that's a big bet. Big bet is saying, I don't just want to help a few people somewhere. I want to solve a problem, do it at massive scale.
I think part of it was...
Thank you, Alana. It's so exciting to be with you.
Well, you know, I was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I bleed blue. My parents were both immigrants from India. They both came here without a lot of resources, but with educational scholarships, my
My grandfather actually emptied his retirement account to buy a one-way ticket for my dad to come to America because they had so much faith back then that this was the country where if you worked hard and played by the rules, the sky was the limit for you and more importantly, your children. That's my story.
I grew up in a tight-knit immigrant community outside of Detroit, primarily a few years in Philadelphia, outside of Philly. And my dad worked at Ford for 34 years. And so I'm a child of the auto industry. I always thought I'd grow up and get to design cars for a living, and it didn't quite work out that way.
Actually, even earlier than that, as a kid, I was told by my family, my community, that I should be an engineer or a doctor. I kind of found both interesting. But over time, I got more and more interested in policy and service. I was, I think, a junior in high school watching on a day off an extraordinary visit when Nelson Mandela came to Detroit.
We never got in Detroit visitors like Nelson Mandela. That was for LA and New York and stuff like that, DC. I was just glued to the TV as he went to the Ford auto plant and talked to workers and then closed out his day at my favorite baseball stadium in America, Tiger Stadium, the old Tiger Stadium, to a packed crowd, talked about concepts like love and honor and values and service.
And I was blown away by the moment and by the experience, even though I was just sitting in my living room the whole time. And I decided I wanted to get an opportunity to do service work abroad. So you fast forward a little bit. I went to college. And as my
college tenure was ending, I had an opportunity to go do some service work in rural South India in a rainforest area with a tribal community called the Soliga. It was a development and health program created by a gentleman named Dr. Sudarshan, who went on appropriately to win the Right Livelihood Award for his just selfless service. But he was a doctor. He'd gone into the bush and
He had established a program that was effectively about treating kids and people with leprosy and epilepsy and tuberculosis. But because he was so overwhelmed by the hunger and starvation he saw in the children in those communities, he started a feeding program. He started a livelihoods program. And he just dedicated his life to helping this community thrive. survive and then rise.
Well, he was at the time in his 40s. I was just a college grad. I was like 20, 21 or 22. And I kind of went there with this idealistic view that I wanted to be like him. And I got there and I took this long trip from Ann Arbor, Michigan to a place called the B.R. Hill's in Southern India. I had a backpack and mosquito repellent and all that stuff.
And they put me in this little hut in the back and I unpacked. And that first night I was just eaten by mosquitoes. I was super hungry, very tired. And I realized quickly that I didn't have what it took to be basically a saint. I mean, this was a gentleman who said, I'm going to give it all up. and dedicate my life to helping each child that walks through the door.
In fact, I'm going to go out into the villages and find those kids. And I knew that I couldn't do that. I couldn't give that much of myself, but I also knew I wanted to spend my life working on these types of issues. And back then in the mid nineties, 14% of the global population was hungry. 11 and a half million kids under the age of five would die of very simple preventable diseases.
And I just started learning about those issues and saying, how can I be involved in working on them in one form or another?
Well, I think it fueled me because I saw people making a difference. I saw other medical students from a local Indian medical school working with Dr. Sudarshan to change the trajectory of these kids' lives.
I saw kids who were deeply malnourished, who were four, five, six, seven years old, and I saw them get resuscitated because they'd come into a feeding program and get targeted feeding support and some medical attention. And I understood even then, if it weren't for these folks, nobody else was going to provide that care and those services.
I met this young girl, maybe five or six, that very first night I was there, I decided I'd go for a walk in the outskirts of the village. And I ran into this girl who just stared at me and she's barefoot and hungry and looked impoverished, but also full of life and big eyes. And she just stared at me like I must've been so strange to look at with my backpack and my mosquito spray and all that.
Showing 1–20 of 124 · page 1 of 7
Next →