Washington, DC
ADMINISTRATOR SAMANTHA POWER: Thank you, Clinton [White]. Full house – standing room only, here, in the RRB [Ronald Reagan Building].
That was vintage Clinton, by the way. Giving a speech – body and soul, and heart into the speech – someone sneezes, because that individual matters, Clinton sees every person, departs from his speech in order to bless the person, and that is Clinton. Every individual is seen and heard, and he just treats everybody with such respect and carries himself with such grace. Thank you, Clinton, so much for your leadership.
So, thanks to all of you for coming, and thanks for those of you who are tuning in from all around the world. It's great to be together, especially as we approach the holidays.
I've, of course, while running strong through the tape, been also trying to take some time to reflect on the last four years. And when I think about the sheer magnitude of what we have faced together, in terms of challenges, and even more so the magnitude of what we have achieved together, I am really taken aback, honestly, and inspired.
There is a common tendency in the human condition, to let the urgent crowd out the important – the tyranny of the inbox, right? And my gosh, what an inbox we have faced, from just events in the world to polarization here at home. And there's a temptation to do all of that, and then maybe leave the sort of big structural issues or the reforms that we know will make us better in the long run, but that you know, sometimes feel as if doing them is in tension with doing the day to day, in a way that we know that we need to do.
But you resisted the tendency to do one at the expense of the other. And, I think what I'm going to do very briefly is just try to capture the extent to which this Agency has responded to the problems and the challenges of the moment, but also transform this Agency in really profound ways to set us up – USAID up, the United States up – for success, for even greater success in the long term.
So to say it’s been an uneventful four years – an eventful four years, to say it would be an uneventful four years, would be crazy – to say eventful would be a gross understatement. You know, again, we have to flash back to 2021, to remember that we arrived with the COVID-19 pandemic still raging around the world, as well as causing major heartbreak, here, at home. Historic natural disasters like the flooding in Pakistan and the drought in the Horn of Africa. Horrific wars in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Ethiopia, and beyond – more conflicts happening at any time since the end of the Cold War.
And you watched these events unfold with maybe shock at the outset, sadness, of course, a thousand other emotions probably, and then you rolled up your sleeves and you got to work. You came in earlier and you stayed later – and you got results.
During COVID, you helped play a critical role in this Administration's massive effort to turn a deadly virus into a manageable respiratory illness by 2022 – you did that. And at the same time, understanding there are countries that are still reeling with the after effects of COVID, providing a path to full economic recovery is support that we offered to our partner nations. While working remotely, you helped USAID coordinate eight U.S. agencies to distribute 688 million vaccine doses to more than 100 countries – I know it’s been a while but it really is worth pausing on the complexity of that unprecedented effort. And you surged support to health systems that will pay off long into the future. For instance, USAID’s pandemic-era investments in improving Ghana’s oxygen supply today account for a full 30 percent of the country’s medical oxygen. So, these are not just about a pandemic moment over a year, but it is about lasting impact.
You recognized that life expectancy had dropped for the first time in decades, and oriented our global health efforts around a foundational drive to build and strengthen primary health care systems and to better support health care workers. Working creatively within a budget that’s heavily earmarked for efforts to combat specific diseases – malaria, TB, HIV/AIDS, COVID when it came. And you work creatively to make that budget focused still on the systemic changes that better prepare us to take on all illnesses – or to support countries in taking on all illnesses. That inflection point, that effort, I think, is going to be remembered generations from now, because we are also leading the donor community in trying to steer resources to primary health in a really fresh, dynamic way.
You also helped move entire school systems online during the pandemic – and then after, used the new tools you developed to help kids recover learning losses. Today, U.S. government programs are reaching more learners than before the pandemic – over 41 million young people in 2023 alone.
In the wake of Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, you all jumped into action to respond to the needs of the Ukrainian people. From providing humanitarian assistance to people fleeing the violence; to standing up the AGRI-Ukraine Initiative to keep grain moving to countries around the world – actually now almost meeting the pre-invasion export totals of grain, incredibly important to food prices globally – to preventing Putin from weaponizing winter by keeping the lights on and the heat flowing for millions of Ukrainian, these efforts, yes, save lives. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. But they also sent a signal that the world will not stand by as an autocrat tries to devastate a nation into submission.
As countries were battered by increasingly severe and frequent natural disasters, you delivered life-saving assistance to meet emergency needs and you catalyzed partners around the world to build longer term resilience, doubling the number of countries we support to tackle the climate crisis from 45 to almost 100, launching massive efforts to take on climate pollutants like methane gas, and mobilizing more than $30 billion in outside public and private climate finance.
As all of these challenges completely upended the global food supply, and sent food and fertilizer prices soaring to all time highs, you drew on relationships and partnerships you’ve cultivated for years to surge seeds, fertilizer, and cash to get quick relief to hungry people and to protect future food production. There are people who are able to bring food to their tables and their families today because of your efforts. And to support the longer-term recovery, you launched the Feed the Future Accelerator in Africa, surging resources to a few countries with particularly high need and particularly high agricultural potential to try to actually transform food systems – create bread baskets – over the long term.
And, of course, most recently, as the world has watched in horror the violence devastating communities in Gaza and in Sudan, you helped navigate some of the most difficult humanitarian environments that people at this Agency have ever seen – fighting to overcome all sorts of obstacles, keeping assistance flowing, as best we can, to get to civilians. I think it's fair to say that the crisis in Gaza in particular has roiled this Agency, and our workforce, maybe in our entire Agency's history, like none other. And I have been grateful for your consistent, really relentless efforts to push this Agency and the entire government to always look out for the most vulnerable. Pushing, pushing, pushing. This is what we should be doing every day when we come to work. Even when the conversations have been difficult, and when it is felt that our efforts are not making a difference that we seek, my team and I have always benefited from the immense commitment and the wide range of experiences that you bring to these conversations – including creative, technical ideas, but also policy criticism. Thank you.
Through it all, you helped us make the structural changes in this Agency to take on barriers that keep us from being as effective as we could be around the world and hopefully to prepare us to better meet future challenges. As we’ve highlighted in our previous, very dedicated, Progress Beyond Programs Town Halls, the progress we have seen across so many critical reform initiatives has been remarkable.
You have helped us move from the top-down approach that at times had characterized USAID assistance in the past, instead bringing in local partners as you designed, executed, and evaluated programs and streamlined our processes to make it easier for local partners to officially work with us. From 2021 to 2024, we doubled the amount of funding going to local partners, and we will see more results when our next report comes out in January.
Faced with a fragmented workforce – 14,000 staff from multiple hiring mechanisms working in more than 100 countries around the world – you worked toward a vision of “One USAID,” launching a series of long-overdue reforms to better support our staff. From empowering our Foreign Service Nationals with the opportunities they deserve, to advocating for benefits like paid parental leave and fair compensation for contractors, to creating more than 900 new federal employee positions in two years – the single biggest increase in USAID’s Foreign Service and Civil Service this century – your efforts have helped build a workforce that is better equipped to take on these challenges.
You also helped build a workforce equipped with the diverse perspectives that we need to do our best work. Thanks to our indefatigable DEIA team, we have signed MOUs with institutions that serve historically-marginalized groups, we doubled the number of Payne Fellowships, and transitioned to paid internships so that people from all economic backgrounds can have a feasible pathway to working with us. And you helped us make strides with our partners abroad – as we saw recently when Prosper Africa signed an MOU with the National Alliance for Black Business, to facilitate trade and investment between businesses in Africa and American Black-owned businesses – helping to drive inclusive economic growth both in African economies and in communities here at home.
And you helped free up the time our teams need to focus on the tasks that matter most, streamlining Agency processes and reducing four million hours of bureaucratic burdens – meaning that you have four million more hours to do the important stuff.
Recognizing that no matter how streamlined or strategic we set up our teams to be, the scale of need, out there in the world – you all know better than I – would never match the scale of resources that we have as an Agency, so you have spent the last four years pulling in new partners. You improved our communications strategy so we could better tell our story – and better convince partners to be a part of it. You built powerful collaborations with groups from multi-lateral development banks to philanthropies to diaspora groups. And you harnessed new tools that we will have in our toolkit going forward, like Compass and the Edge Fund to draw in more private sector partnerships – helping to boost private-sector partner contributions to USAID activities by 42 percent from 2021 to 2023 alone.
We are already seeing how these reforms are allowing us to be more responsive, more efficient, and more catalytic – enabling us to do things like mobilizing billions of dollars to supporting countries undertaking democratic reforms, in our Democracy Delivers Initiative; or building a new Economic Resilience Initiative to help partner countries manage debt, create more jobs, and drive sustained and inclusive growth; or launch a first-of-its kind global coalition to combat lead poisoning. All of those initiatives are reflections of those structural reforms that have us looking out and bringing in new partners.
This is just a small slice of what you have accomplished – if I kept going, we’d be here all day and the question and answer, and the comments are the most important part of this occasion. So, I really just do want to say, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for all of the ways that you have stepped up to meet the challenges of our time. So, I just do want to say thank you, thank you, thank you for all the ways you stepped up to meet the challenges of our time. It sometimes feels, I know, like slow going work, given the headlines at such a mission-driven Agency, that heartbreak that we feel about what is going on in so many communities around the world can sometimes make make it harder to take stock, but I really hope today and many days, you will go out of your way to just pause and reflect on the difference that you are making.
In my end of term speech last week at the Center for Global Development, I talked about how USAID is America’s foreign policy ground game. And I really believe that's true, and maybe we can discuss it in the questions. But what that really means is that you – all of you – are America’s ground game when it comes to advancing the interests of the American people. And you are showing the world, the best of America – those of you who are Americans. For our Foreign Service Nationals tuning in, you are showing the best that America can do when we work hand in glove with the people in and from the communities that we are trying to reach. You are showing we are compassionate, that we are highly competent, and that we see that our fates here are connected to the fates of people everywhere. Being part of this team has been the honor of a lifetime.
Thank you so much.