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Today, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield announced the United States is providing nearly $524 million in critical humanitarian assistance for the Horn of Africa crisis, at the “High-level Pledging Event to Support the Humanitarian Response in the Horn of Africa.” This includes $416 million in USAID funding and nearly $108 million from the Department of State. The impacts of the current drought – the most severe in the Horn of Africa in recorded history – continues to leave 23 million people in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia facing grave hunger. 

​​​​​​​We have made the difficult decision to pause all USAID-supported food assistance in the Tigray region until further notice. 

There’s an old Irish ballad, written during the Great Hunger in 1848, about a starving child who asks his mother if he can eat three grains of corn, found in the pocket of an old jacket. “What has poor Ireland done,” he asks in the song, “that the world looks on and sees us starve, perishing one by one?”

Today in Addis Ababa, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken announced that the United States, through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), is providing an additional $319 million in lifesaving humanitarian assistance for the people of Ethiopia and $12 million through the State Department Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) to support refugees, asylum-seekers, and people affected by conflict and drought.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is proud to announce six new research and development awards, co-created by USAID’s Local, Faith, and Transformative Partnerships (LFT) Hub with a diverse range of local and traditionally underutilized partners, to support USAID’s commitment to locally led development. 

I will say right off the bat that the Congress put the United States in an incredible position to lead in the response – the humanitarian response – because with the Ukraine supplementals that passed earlier this year, they actually gave us flexibility to provide humanitarian assistance also to those crises that were indirectly affected by Putin and his gratuitous and horrific invasion of Ukraine.