Moving from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the head of a government agency with 8,000 employees in 82 countries is no small shift.

But Rajiv Shah is using his experience at the Gates Foundation to reshape the way America's development arm works, from narrowing the focus of its programs and emphasizing science and technology, to creating a new Global Health Initiative with specific goals to reduce deaths from preventable diseases.

DEAN RUTZ/SEATTLE TIMES

After working for the Gates Foundation in various roles for eight years, Rajiv Shah was sworn in as USAID administrator just five days before the earthquake struck Haiti.

Shah returned to Seattle from Washington D.C., where he is administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, to speak at the Life Science Innovation Northwest annual conference. He later stopped by the Times for an interview.

In January he arrived at an agency that had lost half of its staff and much of its clout over the past 15 years.

Development work had been shifted to private contractors or to the Department of Defense, and many of the best people left USAID, diminishing its "intellectual leadership," he said.

As the new USAID administrator, his job is to help turn that around. The Obama Administration has pledged to double foreign aid, and the agency is now hiring 400 foreign service officers a year, Shah said.

Shah said he will call on companies working in life sciences to focus some of their energy on global health. USAID is spending $63 billion over six years on a Global Health Initiative and is looking for solutions including:

--Vaccines for HIV, TB and malaria
--Longer lasting contraception and microbicides
--Simple diagnostic tools for TB and malaria
--Solutions for transferring health data from remote sites
--Technologies to eliminate the need for temperature control of vaccines

The Global Health Initiative's goals include:

--Reducing pregnancy-related deaths by 30 percent, saving the lives of 360,000 women
--Preventing three million child deaths a year
--Preventing one million deaths from tuberculosis
--Cutting malaria cases by half in sub-Saharan Africa

Five days after he was sworn in, a catastrophic earthquake struck Haiti, killing an estimated 230,000 people, and Shah was charged with coordinating the massive U.S. relief effort.

Haiti has become a testing ground for whether USAID can overcome challenges of a dysfunctional bureaucracy, and for the larger project of "rebranding America across the world."

Problems over food aid, procurement and trade policy have been some of the agency's biggest challenges.

Last week Haitian President Rene Preval said Haiti needs help with job creation and less donated food, which can undermine local producers.

Shah said USAID was able to source the first 6,500 metric tons of rice for emergency aid to Haiti from local producers.

"It just created a mindset that these are capable resilient communities and we need to respect and work with them," he said.

Building local capacity means giving more contracts to local NGOs, rather than requiring U.S. contractors to do the development work. Shah said contracts above $75 million are now subject to review to try to break them into smaller pieces, and distribute work locally.

In some poor countries, trade and aid work at cross purposes. In 2006 the U.S. gave $120 million in aid to Bangladesh and Cambodia and collected $853 million from them in import duties, according to a report by the Initiative for Global Development.

The model of wealthy countries sending money to poor ones is outdated, Shah said.

New global realities require partnerships with emerging countries such as China, India, Brazil and Russia. They are starting to play a role as donors and taking on development work in places like Africa. If Chinese can build roads and other infrastructure more cheaply, it's smarter for the U.S. to contribute something else, he said.