Ann Mei Chang
Executive Director, U.S. Global Development Lab • U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)
Ann Mei Chang was 12 when personal computers first became available. Fascinated, she asked her parents for a computer and taught herself to code. When she started her undergraduate degree at Stanford in 1985, the University didn’t have a Computer Science program. Undaunted, she helped define the degree and was in the first graduating class of CS majors. “What has been fascinating, is to see it burgeon into one of the most popular majors; back then it was very small.”
With over 20 years of engineering and leadership experience in Silicon Valley she has seen a lot of change in the industry: she served as a Senior Engineering Director at Google for 8 years, led the Mobile Software team to 20 times growth in Google’s mobile business in three years, and delivered over $1 billion in annual revenue.
During the dot-com bust, Ann Mei worked herself out of a job by closing the division she was leading at a startup. When faced with challenges like these, Ann Mei recommends “not taking it too personally and seeing the challenges as opportunities.” She took the year off to travel around the world. Taking that risk taught her “something better will happen on the other end.”
After spending the first part of her career in the private sector, Ann Mei shifted her focus to the public sector at the intersection of international development and innovation, where she worked at the U.S. Department of State and as the Chief Innovation Officer at Mercy Corps. Now she is the Executive Director of the U.S Global Development Lab, knows as the Lab, at the U.S. Agency for International Development. The Lab brings modern tools and approaches to international development to address some of the world’s biggest challenges. It opens up the field of international development to new people, new technologies, and new ideas and helps make development more evidence-based and more agile.
“We use modern technologies, such as mobile phones, internet connectivity and electronic payments, to improve people’s lives in developing countries. We work with the rest of the agency, including our field missions abroad, to figure out where our tools can be most helpful to the development process. For example, through our work with the Alliance for Affordable Internet, we recognize that having greater Internet connectivity drives more economic growth. But many people in developing countries are not online and one of the biggest deterrents to full access is cost. By promoting best practices in policy and regulation, we can help markets be more competitive and efficient, and thereby more affordable.”
Ann Mei's recently wrote a fantastic piece on Foreign Assistance in the Digital Age. Read it at http://brook.gs/1M1pyF6 .
