Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala Address to MIT Class of 2022
[Applause] well thank you for that more than wonderful introduction it is so lovely to be here with you today president reiff chancellor nobles provost barnhart ms green president of the mit cooperation alumni hello classes of 70 71 and 72. faculty staff parents friends and most importantly the graduates of mit's class of 2022 i could not be more honored or more delighted to be here with you in killian court with today it is a bittersweet day because this is also the last commencement of a wonderful president and a good friend rafael reif i want to i want to take just a moment to pay tribute to his academic institutional and thought leadership of these past 10 years the mit model which president reif has done so much to develop is influencing higher education and research around the world a testament to this is a number of former mit professors and staff now in senior positions at other top universities to take just a few examples former associate provost and vice president for research alice gast is now president of imperial college london having previously served in that role at lehigh university subra suresh former dean of the school of engineering became president of carnegie mellon university after a stint in the obama administration and now leads the prestigious non-young technological university in singapore all of you will remember provost martin marty schmidt who was recently appointed president of rensselaer polytechnic institute and of course i have to mention someone i remember as a young professor of environmental studies in no other than dusk the department of urban studies and planning former mit chancellor and current harvard professor larry bakau president rife symbolizes what is so respected about mit around the world human-centered science and innovation for the challenges of today but also looking ahead to the challenges of tomorrow and the decades to come raphael we wish you well in your new endeavors as i stand here memories are flooding back on my first day of graduate school as an mcp student in dusk in september 1976 i must give a shout out to dust now hello das i remember going to the international students office worried about how i was going to cover my tuition and board for the second semester and thereafter i was met with wide smiles and open arms by the wonderful staff in that office they told me not to worry and that once they get an international student in their job is to make sure that student graduates they would help me find the means and ra or ta position or a loan they were proud they said that international students had one of the best loan repayment records among all students so i shouldn't worry i should just concentrate on my studies they had my back you can imagine what a warm and fuzzy feeling that gave me especially since i could reliably say that not every cambridge based institution was as welcoming at that time so began my love for this great institution on whose grounds we stand today in 1981 i again stood where we are today having finished my phd in regional economics and development under the supervision of a kraka jack dissertation committee led by professors alan strout karen polensky and lloyd rodwin that was as scary as it was demanding i was heavily pregnant virtually nine months with my first child when i defended my dissertation writing the dissertation itself had been rocky with lots of tearful weekends as i struggled with my data and sbss does anyone remember that i clearly remember alan telling me after i first i submitted my first chapter that it was below my usual standard and that i should tear it up and start again i spent all weekend in tears before picking myself up and starting over in fact i'm convinced that they only let me get away with the defense because of that baby i let them know i was due any moment and that i could have the baby that day maybe right there during the defense they look terrified and you can imagine how quickly it all went so they could get me out of there by the way this is a good trick to try um but i'm sorry it won't work for you men mit has helped make me who i am today i know how hard each of you has worked to get here i hope that as you embark on this journey called life you will return one day as i have done today with good feelings and these same words mit help make me who i am today on top of the demands of one of the world's most famously rigorous academic institutions your time at mit has been disrupted by the covid19 pandemic all of you have had to adjust and adapt a pandemic is not something i had to deal with as a student but my education was also interrupted when i was young by the civil war in nigeria the nigeria biafra war i did not go to school for three years from the ages of 12 to 15 as my family ran from place to place in biafra to escape the bombs and the shelling the images we see from the war in ukraine today remind me of the suffering i witnessed and endured then my family made it through but lost everything and had to start over i was able to go back to school but my parents made clear to me that education is a privilege and with that privilege comes responsibility the responsibility to use it for others not just for yourself and that is why today when i think of the children of valde i feel pain i feel grief as a mother and a grandmother i feel devastated that lesson about education which these children have been so deprived is a lesson i carry with me every day now i'm not here to tell you what to do with your lives but i'm here to say that the world needs your smarts your skills your adaptability and the great training you have received here at mit the world needs you for innovation for policy making for connecting the dots to so implementation can actually happen so let me say a few words on combining science social science and public policy to meet the challenges of our future the difficult and uncertain times we live in have been called a poly crisis simultaneous compounding crisis in the economy the environment public health and international security the kovid 19 pandemic is still with us soaring food costs were threatening hunger in poor countries even before the war in ukraine made the situation much worse and heatwaves from south asia to europe already lowering these seasons farm yields in countries like india yet another reminder that climate change is here mit the university its faculty and researchers its students and you its freshly minted graduates sit squarely in the middle of providing the multifaceted solutions we need to the challenges of the global commons that we confront today let me explain why a common thread running through many of these challenges is the central role for science we need technological innovation to get us out of the holes we're in at the same time for the kinds of problems we're dealing with new inventions and new ways of doing things will have an impact mainly to the extent they are scaled up across dividing lines of income and geography we don't just need vaccines we need shots in arms across the world to be safe we need new renewable technologies that are fused not just in rich countries to fight climate change but also in poor ones we need new agricultural technologies built to local conditions and culture if we are to fight hunger in other words we need innovation but we also need access equity diffusion we need to get the science right and we need to get the domestic and international policy frameworks the incentive structures and the public and private investments right too mit of course is perched at the cutting edge of both science social science and public policy to buttress the case i'm making i want to look at some scientific and public policy issues associated with the kovite 19 response as well as climate change and as a proud mit alum i will also look at how the mit community has been working on these 21st century problems since at least the 1970s and as director general of the world trade organization i shall link this to where multilateralism and trade has been a force for good amplifying and diffusing new ideas and new technology but i'll also comment on when international cooperation has been falling short in getting policy frameworks and solutions right turning now to the global challenges it's clear that if if your president writes big preoccupations getting the innovation we need and speeding up the time between new ideas and commercialized products are directly relevant to the road where travelling now as a global community and to the road ahead when we look at the kovid 19 response we see we had good science but not so good politics and public policy we knew a pandemic was overdue bill gates even gave a famous ted talk about the risks back in 2015 but we were not ready this has been made painfully clear by the roughly 15 million excess deaths worldwide over the past two and a half years as estimated by the world health organization at the national and international levels we hadn't made the necessary health system investments nor had we put in place the governance arrangements and early warning systems needed to identify and contain potentially dangerous new pathogens in other words policy-wise pandemic preparedness was on a global level totally missing but we were fortunate that scientists were better prepared science enabled us to address a global public bad thereby saving millions of lives safe and effective vaccines came online in this place of mere months after the novel coronavirus was identified but this seemingly overnight success was years even decades in the making and mit was at the heart of that story at mit center for cancer research in the 1970s back when kendall square was still mostly warehouses and factories future institute professor nobel laureate philip sharp discovered rna splicing his work revealed the potential of messenger rna the technology behind the most effective covid19 vaccines around the same time another future institute professor robert langer dsing chemical engineering mit class of 1974 began decades of pioneering work on the drug delivery of large molecules including mrna in 2010 he participated in the founding of a company that aimed to do something totally new to develop modified rna therapeutics that company struggled for years high on promise but low on cash until the covered 19 pandemic struck and modena's vaccine made it a household name but even though the world got the innovation it needed and it was successfully commercialized we fell short on access when vaccines became available we did not prioritize the most vulnerable populations in the world and we did not prioritize all front line workers in our countries instead much of 2021 saw what who director general tedros gabrielesis described us and i quote a handful of rich countries gobbling up the anticipated supply as manufacturers sold to the highest bidder while the rest of the world scrambled for straps unquote as with life-saving hiv aids drugs 20 years ago people in poor countries especially in africa found themselves at the back of the queue for covid19 vaccines the kovacs facility which i'm proud to say i participated in birthing as an ambitious attempt to avoid a repeat of that experience by getting vaccines to poor countries at the same time as rich ones was frustrated in its goals by vaccine nationalism and a lack of international solidarity while global vaccine supplies have not increased the lag in getting this to poor countries allowed apathy and vaccine hesitancy to set in leading to a situation where on the back of weak health systems only 17 percent of people in africa and 13 percent of people in low-income countries have been fully vaccinated compared to 75 percent of people in high-income countries since we all know that no one is safe until everyone is safe the risk of more dangerous variants and pathogens remains real because of this public policy lapse and the lack of timely international cooperation let me talk a bit about climate change climate change is another problem that we cannot solve without scientific innovation and diffusion we have made real progress so long wind up generation costs are plummeted we trade an international competition playing important roles in driving costs down but storing that energy is still expensive so we still need breakthroughs there like we do on cutting emissions from marine and air transport from industry from buildings from agriculture and land use we also need more optic of existing green technologies for all the teslas we might see around us here only 4.5 of vehicles in the us are electric but mit researchers at the forefront of research on batteries and energy storage the mit energy initiative is working to meet energy needs whilst minimizing climate and other environmental impacts the future energy system center is doing research on every imaginable aspect of the low carbon transition from how to produce hydrogen at scale to assessing zero carbon options for moving freight over long distances the d lab is helping to bring energy to off-grid communities mit urban planners are thinking about how to make the mega cities of the future both live livable and sustainable so science and innovation are hard at work to help bring solutions to an existential threat of our time a threat that science also helped to elucidate with the wonderful work of the intergovernmental panel on climate change but to make these innovations transformative and central to decarbonization of the world international cooperation is key and once again the world is failing six months ago at cop 26 in glasgow where i participated it became clear that the rich world is again unable and unwilling to fulfill the pledge it made in the paris accords of 2015 to put together financing of a hundred billion dollars a year at a time when we spent 14 trillion dollars on fiscal stimulus to fight the pandemic which is a good public policy response don't get me wrong it was the right thing to do but if you can mobilize 14 trillion dollars i don't understand why you cannot mobilize a hundred billion dollars to support poor countries whose contributions to carbon emissions in any case have been minimal to help them make the transition to a low carbon future by taking advantage of new and renewable technologies it is these kinds of public policy failures these lapses in harnessing science and innovation for the greater public good that drew me to the career that i pursued in international development the question that i asked myself was how can we allow people to die or to remain poor when the science and innovation to change their lives exists and what can i do about it my training at mit gave me the framework i needed to pursue the career path i followed in international development it was training that would enable me as a practitioner and policy maker to connect science and innovation to people's lives and to make a difference just a couple of examples at the world bank i had the opportunity to bring then innovative approach of sites and services development that we studied in dusk to poor urban dwellers in spanish town jamaica to enable them build their own homes incrementally over time thereby creating an asset and creating wealth for them for the first time in their lives when i worked on agriculture it was bringing improved seeds and new agricultural technologies to poor farmers in africa and the middle east to enable them improve their incomes and household welfare at a pace they could not have imagined possible in nigeria as finance minister and working with the minister of agriculture we implemented budgetary policies that put mobile phones in the hands of two million women farmers so that through their electronic wallets they could directly receive government vouchers that enable them to access improved seeds and fertilizers and improve their yields and production with respect to finance we put in place a technology-based financial management solution with biometrics that enable government to weed out millions of ghost workers who also became ghost pensioners and we saved over a billion dollars in fraudulent salary and pension claims when i joined garvey the vaccine alliance bridging the gap between science and public policy meant supporting the piloting of a new malaria vaccine that could save millions of children's lives and stockpiling an experimental ebola vaccine giving millions more people a chance at survival should ebola strike again which it has and at the wto bridging the gap when the ability to work with vaccine manufacturers to deal with the problems in their complicated supply chains so that trade in inputs could flow freely and enable them to scale up covered 19 production for the world it has also meant the fight to allow more flexible rights to intellectual property for coveted 19 vaccines whilst protecting its incentives for research and development so that developing countries can undertake their own vaccine manufacturing ladies and gentlemen dear graduates the problem solving approach i've taken in my career my quest to bridge gaps between science innovation and public policy to take a bit of risk to try new approaches has paid off in a rewarding career whose satisfaction is the ability to serve others so in these uncertain times in this complex world in which you're entering you need not be so daunted if you can search for the opportunities hidden in challenges if you can take some considered risks and try new approaches create new pathways and if you can connect the dots in disconnected approaches to problem solving let me conclude by saying that you have all succeeded in making it in truly extraordinary times to paraphrase nelson mandela one of my heroes you have made what seemed impossible possible your parents and faculty are rightly proud of you so am i so go out into the world embrace the opportunities to serve i wish you all the very best congratulations and godspeed [Applause] you
2022-05-30 07:51
