Stern '12 Dedicated to Making Foreign Aid More Effective

A high school teacher once told Alena Stern ’12 that the prospects for sustainable development in Sub-Saharan Africa were “hopeless.” Stern’s unwillingness to accept this statement sparked an interest in international development that has come to define her undergraduate career.

Stern is an International Relations and Economics double major at the College of William & Mary.  The Denver, Col., native applied to work for the Institute for the Theory and Practice of International Relations (ITPIR) her freshman year because she wanted to learn about development while working on a project with real-world impact.

Through ITPIR she became involved with AidData -- a partnership between William & Mary, Brigham Young University, and Development Gateway to improve the quality of aid allocation and aid effectiveness research and to create innovative tools that increase transparency and accountability in the foreign aid sector. AidData has created the world's most comprehensive source of project-level information about foreign assistance flows. It tracks more than $4.2 trillion dollars and 957,000 projects from 79 donor agencies...