Speeches Shim
Today’s MOU with Alcorn State will challenge us to do even more to bring Alcorn’s pioneering spirit to USAID, tackling the longstanding barriers HBCUs and their students have faced in attempting to partner with us.
Just last week, the U.S. government announced more than $152 million in additional humanitarian assistance funding for the Rohingya humanitarian crisis, which includes support for those affected by the ongoing violence in neighboring Burma, refugees from Burma in Bangladesh, and Bangladeshi host communities. This brings the total amount of humanitarian assistance donated by the United States to more than $1.7 billion since August 2017, the largest of any single donor. USAID will use its portion of this funding to provide emergency food and nutrition assistance, shelter, safe drinking water, and sanitation and hygiene services to affected communities in both countries. And we’re continuing to deepen our partnership to improve public health, with 61 million doses of vaccines and nearly $140 million to date to support Bangladesh’s fight against the pandemic.
At USAID, we are committed to building on 50 years of development progress for the Bangladeshi people. Over the past five decades, USAID has contributed more than $7 billion in development and humanitarian assistance to support Bangladesh’s development journey. Our assistance—from the American people to the Bangladeshi people—has provided critical support to your efforts to alleviate poverty, drive rapid economic growth, improve food security, cut maternal and child mortality, electrify rural populations, bolster disaster risk reduction, combat climate change and foster development and growth through clean energy, renewable energy and energy efficiency. All of this has helped Bangladesh progress beyond Least Developed Country status.
And then of course inside Ukraine, further inside Europe you might say, the number one issue really is the besieged areas. And the fact that President Putin and his forces just are not allowing food, medicine, fuel, and at the same time shelling them to smithereens. I mean, 82 attacks on hospital facilities, more than 500 on educational facilities, and again that encirclement and that attempt to use civilians and their pain and their starvation to try to extract surrenders. So far it’s not working, it puts an enormous amount of pressure on political leaders who of course want to defend the territory, but at the same time we’re seeing their people experiencing suffering that we haven’t seen since World War II.
First, let me just say that Rob and Julie are leading an incredible team here at USAID that has devoted countless hours to a full interagency effort to bring the Global Fragility Act to life through the U.S. Strategy to Prevent Conflict and Promote Stability.
I went with President Biden just this last weekend and it's way more organized in the frontline countries than it was probably within when you were there and when I was first there in the first week of the invasion. But the demographics of who's coming across remains almost exclusively women and children. And there's not that much room in the inn left in the front line countries, the countries are really saturated. Host families have opened their homes, their hearts, their lives to these newcomers, but there just isn't that much space in Poland, Slovakia, Romania, et cetera.
USAID gives kind of two kinds of assistance, so the first is humanitarian assistance, keep people alive, make sure they have access to medicine, make sure, just that they have enough rations to get them through the day. Again, the underlying premise of humanitarian assistance is that a war will end, at some point, and people will get to go home. And the tragedy of recent years is that so few wars have ended, and that wars are lasting longer and longer. So that people are living in this state of protracted displacement.
You all have devoted your lives to springing into action whenever you see human suffering. But it’s fair to say, I think, that none of us have ever seen the speed and the scale of this destruction in our lifetimes. It took a little over four years for four million refugees to flee the Syrian War. Ukraine could reach that number four days from now—just over a month since the war began.
Without complete, accurate data, entire groups of people are invisible to us. All too often, they are the ones we most need to see, and all too often they are women. Together, we can make women’s empowerment a top priority and close the gender data gap in agriculture. If we expand the WEAI, streamline it, improve it, if we measure what is hard to measure, we won't just make women visible; we will serve them. We will empower them. We will learn from them. We will prove that they matter. Thank you so much.
To state the obvious, the need for this Coalition has never been more pressing. Irreversible harm has already befallen our planet and made climate-related disasters unavoidable. Now, every nation on earth, including my own, is forced to grapple with the repercussions. Here in the U.S., our roads and bridges are suffering damages. They are cracked and boiled by record breaking temperatures. Down south, stronger and more frequent hurricanes are destroying electric grids and power lines, causing billions of dollars' worth of damage. And out west, droughts and high temperatures are leading to forest fires that ravage entire communities, igniting houses, schools, small businesses, and anything else in their path. But, despite the hardships many Americans are facing, we know that the nations least responsible for producing the emissions that fuel climate change are, of course, facing its most dire consequences.
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Last updated: May 06, 2022
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