Nairobi, Kenya
ADMINISTRATOR SAMANTHA POWER: This assistance will go to things like building a fertilizer hub in Tanzania, drip irrigation, drought resistant seeds, helping offer training to farmers, getting that learning, that knowledge, that technology to farmers, particularly smallholder farmers, particularly female smallholder farmers, quickly, that is what I think we will use these resources to partner with our friends on the continent to spur.
CATHERINE BYARUHANGA: The U.S. has pledged more money, $171 million for the emergency response for Sudan and neighboring countries. But talking about, you know, the two million people who've been displaced, how hopeful are you that you will actually be able to get help to them, considering that the fighting is still going on?
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Those numbers may well be an underestimation of need. I mean, such are the access and mobility challenges that we are having on the ground. And so what we, as USAID, are doing is we are trying to transition from, you know, an assistance model in emergencies that has tended to go mainly through the UN and other large international actors to recognizing that there are these nimble, brave, resilient forces who are community based and are volunteers and who are, you know, reaching elderly people who can't get out of their apartments with food, who are bringing fuel to ambulance drivers so that they can go and pick up people who've been harmed in the fighting.
So there are those networks, but we are – we definitely have a long way to go in being able to fully tap, I think, Sudanese ingenuity.
MS. BYARUHANGA: I have to ask you about Ethiopia, because this is the largest USAID food assistance program in the world. But you've taken the dramatic decision to suspend food aid distribution in the country because of massive corruption. How bad was it?
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Really bad. You know, an issue where food comes into the country and it gets diverted before it reaches the intended beneficiaries, we see it turning up in a market and being sold so someone's making a profit. Investigations are underway both by us and by the national authorities, but what I can say is we are really eager to restart assistance and to do so, we need to have that confidence that the food is reaching the intended beneficiaries. And that's going to require very substantial, but I hope also very expeditious, reforms on the part of the relationship between donors like USAID and the Ethiopian authorities.