Clare Ignatowski

Dr. Clare A. Ignatowski’s research focuses on foreign assistance reform in Africa, including the use of systems approaches for greater sustainability and scale in development efforts. As a Senior Advisor at the United States Agency for International Development and Director of Human and Community Development at Millennium Challenge Corporation, she has dedicated her career to meeting the challenge of global youth employment and access to education through innovations inspired by the positive youth development paradigm and systems thinking. She has designed programs currently underway in Ethiopia, Kenya, Liberia, Morocco, Rwanda, and Uganda and targeting hundreds of thousands of young people. Dr. Ignatowski is the author of Journey of Song: Public Life and Morality in Cameroon (Indiana University Press, 2006), which explores the creative and communal process by which local livelihoods and identities are validated in dance and song. Her journal articles in Africa, Cultural Anthropology, Journal of Research on Adolescence, and Research in Comparative and International Education examine how values associated with modernity and changing patterns of socialization of young people are debated in discourse and practice in settings as diverse as schools, community dance, and foreign assistance regimes.