Administrator Samantha Power at the Mission Directors' Conference

ADMINISTRATOR SAMANTHA POWER: Welcome to everyone who has traveled so far to be with us today. I just love this event, I wish we could do it quarterly. I would learn so much, we would be able to refine and iterate in a more immediate, intimate way than through our monthly Mission Director calls. But, this is just such an important stocktaking opportunity, it's such an important learning opportunity for us back here, and I hope for you as well.

So, it's been, like, a few years, I guess, since I've had the chance to gather with you in this venue. And, I'm just struck by the progress for real that you all have made out in what is the messiest world of our lifetime and feels like it's just getting ever more so. We launched our reform effort about three-and-a-half years ago. We wanted to prepare the Agency for the greatest challenges of our time, that were already causing many of the communities in which we work to reel, particularly because you never know what to focus on because there's just so much coming at you at once.

We wanted to do our best to make sure that our approaches weren't siloed. We wanted our workforce, of course, to reflect the diversity and perspectives of the communities that we served. We wanted to better support local partners who are the experts on problems facing down their own communities and the experts on what to prioritize, how to prioritize, and, of course, we wanted to extend progress beyond our funded programs. We knew that even though we were getting more and more generous budgets, especially if you threw in the, what would become the so-called "Ukraine supps" that had global reach. But still, we could just feel it, you could feel it on the front lines that our resources just weren't keeping up.

So, in order to drive the kind of development progress that we seek in order to make up for the lost ground from COVID and get development trajectories back on track, we simply had to go beyond our traditional budgets and hustle out there in the world.

In truth, the vision that we have put out there is one that we developed by seeing you in action. This work had been led by you for a very long time. That said, in creating the vision and laying it out even if it was a crowdsource division, it has required huge investments from you: your time, your energy, your resources, and those were in short supply certainly when I got into my role. That was one of the biggest pieces of feedback that I got in walking in the door. And yet, how could we not put forward the priorities, any one of the priorities, that we've put forward.

I think that's been a challenge. So many priorities. You have so many priorities. At the same time, you're going to give up on climate change? Not do private sector investment? Not go digital when the world is going digital? Not address resilience? Food security? These interlocking crises that are undermining so much of the work we're doing in education, in global health - not actually focused on primary health with a new zeal? It's just this is the world we are in.

So bringing in more local partners asked a lot of you, you navigated the dense thicket of legal requirements, as well as the staffing challenge of doing that. You overcame a lot of bureaucratic habits to change policies and practices. And, as it happens, since 2021, the amount of USAID funding going to local partners has risen by 60 percent. That's you. That's what you've done. To build up new relationships with the private sector, you grew relationships, expanded rolodexes, pursued creative forms of partnership, and made a compelling case to our private sector interlocutors that smart investments in development also strengthen company's bottom lines.

And, we all know that while we like it when our values align with our private sector partners, it is more enduringly reliable when a private sector partner is convinced that their bottom line is enhanced. You made that case, you drew the evidence forward, and thanks in part to these efforts, private sector contributions have also increased by more than 60 percent just in the past few years. That's you.

To build more equitable workplaces, you had to rethink norms and instinctive habits, biases, and that in some cases had been ingrained for decades. Today, for our local staff, or our Foreign Service Nationals, the number of FSN-13s across the agency has increased by more than 50 percent. And, we've created more than 60 new FSN deputy office director positions. I can talk about, and you will hear a lot about the number of fellowships that we have created back here at headquarters and elsewhere. But, what people don't talk about when they talk about the number of fellowships and how that number has exploded, is what happens back at the home office - who's providing those approvals, who's moving staff around, so that work can get done where people come expand their horizons, make the connections back here, that they - that will then come in handy when they're back in the mission. But who does that? That's you. That's you.

To address the daunting set of global challenges that we face, you have had to harness budgets that always feel too little, and teams stretched too thin, and you have been innovative. Just a couple examples and, you know, we take such pride in talking about so many examples in building this library of stories which are fundamentally a part of how we scale those stories is to tell them. In Colombia, 90 percent of roads are in poor condition - improving them is the single highest priority year after year for residents of rural communities. Traditionally, USAID might have thought to pay an implementing partner to do some of that work, an approach which, if the past is prologue, would have helped fix about 180 miles of roads. But the incredible team at USAID/Columbia recognized that the Government of Colombia, of course, had the engineering expertise and the resources to invest in this work, and 29,000 local organizations had the ability to implement them. All they needed was someone to organize them and that's exactly what the Mission did. Today, Colombia is now on track to repair more than 20,000 miles of roads all across the country.

In rural communities in Kenya, harmful stigmas around menstruation can prevent young women from learning proper menstrual hygiene techniques, placing them of course at higher risk of infections, birth complications, and even infertility. In the past, implementing partners may have led efforts to distribute menstrual products and hold dialogues in communities where menstruation is taboo. But, the Mission in Kenya instead partnered with the Mati Babu foundation. For 15 years with foundation support, young Kenyan women were already traveling around communities on boda bodas, a kind of motorcycle some of you know well, to give women safe rides to health centers and raise awareness on general health and hygiene practices like handwashing.

Now, with USAID support, these so-called boda girls have incorporated menstrual hygiene practices into their health curriculum. They are starting necessary conversations within their own communities about menstrual health. And by doing this work, being out there in the communities in this way, they are modeling the benefits of women's empowerment for community progress. Every one of you has stories like this from your own teams, and really this is the week to share them and to learn from one another.

But, your tremendous impact really will build on itself because you have built movements of effective coordinated changemakers around the world. You've harnessed the power of diaspora communities in new ways. Partnering as well with multilateral development banks including the MDB reform agenda, informing that agenda by what you know about what works in the world. You have paved the way for countless local organizations to take greater advantage of our resources. You have fostered an entire generation of Foreign Service National leaders across all of our missions, and you've trained an entire generation of Foreign Service Officers to better position local voices on their teams to lead our work and future administrations.

You have inspired so many of us in this Agency, including me, to be more entrepreneurial, to hustle more. My slogan, as some of you know, is if you care more and work harder, you will prevail in the end. And, I really think you are living that every day. But we know, of course, that you need support from us to keep driving transformational change. Our entire leadership is committed to fighting for what you need in order to keep getting results. We know that in the age of increased geostrategic competition, which I'm sure you'll hear more about from Jake [Sullivan], you need resources. When we say progress beyond programs, we don't mean no programs. We don't mean - programs are absolutely foundational, and you need resources, you need resources to help countries build their core economic resilience. An area of emphasis that has recently been so constrained by our earmarks in my first year traveling around the world, I was completely shocked at how little money you all had to work with to fuel economic growth and economic resilience.

At the very time, the countries you're working with were recovering from COVID. At the very time joblessness was a major issue. They had to fuel economic growth, they had to fuel employment. All of these issues were coming at you, your partners, your interlocutors are pleading for more resources. And yet, for all of our earmarks so little in this space. But, even in the constrained budget environment we've been operating and even with all the local needs, and so many incredibly worthy areas of emphasis, we were able to secure close to $100 million over the past two years in economic resilience funding, specifically dedicated to helping the countries in which we work to strengthen their economies and to manage debt challenges. We will continue to find innovative ways to bring in private sector investment building on the creation of the EDGE fund, the massively oversubscribed $50 million funding source designed to unleash private sector impact on global development challenges. You might hear a little bit about the EDGE fund from Jake who I think is a fan of the EDGE fund if I'm not mistaken.

We know that in order to keep building diverse teams and partnerships, we need to build connections between USAID and underrepresented people and organizations. Connections that in many cases haven't existed in the past. So, we're going to keep building relationships with HBCUs [Historically black colleges and universities] and other minority serving institutions, so that when you go looking for people to hire, or partners to work with, you can draw on that deep and diverse bench of talent. We know that you need help, not just driving your work overseas, again, this is something Jake may speak about, but communicating that work.

Branding is incredibly important. We're gonna have a lot of discussions about branding, I'm sure this week. But branding alone is not communicating. So, we are putting together resources to help you in an age of misinformation, in an age of geostrategic competition, in an age where just breaking through even if there weren't lies and misinformation is so hard. Giving you messaging manuals that prioritize key areas of our work, refining our storytelling ability which is not something that comes naturally to all. Providing in-person trainings that so far have helped 75 percent of all of our mission communications staff more effectively message what USAID is doing.

And, of course, we know that in order to take on the ever growing interlocking challenges, you need more of the scarcest commodity of all, guess - your time. So, we will continue to find ways to slash the sludge, the administrative and reporting requirements that burden your already busy teams, continuing our burden reduction program, which has eliminated roughly four million hours of staff time spent on navigating red tape. The time taxes of the reporting requirements are almost fatal. We are staffing up already. We have created more than 900 new federal employee positions in the Civil and Foreign Service - the single biggest increase in more than a decade. By the end of this year, the Foreign Service will be at its highest staffing level since 2017, and the most diverse, of course, it has ever been in history in the Agency. But today more than ever, we need you to lead - lead in changing not just our programs, but our mindset. Our hustle. We need you to innovate, to convene, to partner, to persuade, and ultimately to build larger movements for sustained change inside and outside the Agency.

I hope this Mission Director conference will help you gain the insights and learnings and inspiration that you need to continue that effort. To listen to the creative ways other missions have addressed the challenges facing your own teams through our throughlines all around the world: climate, debt, technology, and of course, just the management of these diverse and incredibly important teams. To build a deeper bench of changemakers, inside USAID, outside USAID, inside the U.S. government, outside of the U.S. government.

Most of all, before I hand off, and enjoy the fireside chat that awaits us, I just want to say thank you really and truly. I'll have a chance to speak to you again at the end of the week. Every administration comes in with lofty goals, ways that we want to push the envelope, change the way we do development. President Biden came in with a set of lofty goals, Jake came in with a set of lofty goals - Secretary Blinken, myself, the entire national security team. But it is you who have inspired the vision that I have just played back to you with your creativity and with your entrepreneurship, and, again, your hustle. It is you who take abstract policy frameworks like the one that we've devised strategy, policy documents that come at you fast and furious. You turn all of those from paper to practice, and it is you who will continue to help this Agency make the impact that outlasts us all.

Thank you so much.

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