Administrator Samantha Power at the Swearing-in Ceremony for Incoming USAID Mission Director for Bangladesh Kathryn Stevens

[As Prepared]

Good morning, everyone.

I want to thank Karen for kicking us off, and Ambassador Miller and Ambassador Islam for being here to welcome USAID All Star and proud Texan Kathryn Stevens as our Mission Director to Bangladesh.

I also want to welcome Christian, her husband, and Quinton, her son, who are here to cheer her on. When you pursue life as a foreign service officer, the sacrifices you make are not born alone—and I want to thank Kathryn’s family in advance for the late night calls to DC, and all the time at the dinner table spent talking about health metrics and poverty reduction programming.

It can be tempting to look at the path of someone’s career, and assume that their trajectory was predestined—that it was inevitable they’d end up where they did.

And in Kathryn’s case, the path to leadership in Bangladesh feels like a straight line. Tours in regional neighbors India and Pakistan; a stint in Afghanistan, the only Mission larger than Bangladesh in Asia; time in DC spent refining her leadership on matters of policy, legislative affairs, internal communications— really important experience as we elevate USAID’s voice in policy debates as well as on core programming issues; even a recent stretch on our COVID-19 task force, working to end the greatest threat Bangladesh is now facing.

But such paths only look preordained in reverse; each step in Kathryn’s impressive nearly 25-year USAID career has its own story.

In India, Kathryn’s colleagues spoke about her “infectious optimism” and her “rare ability to make real and personal connections with anyone”—the foreign minister, a local Delhi shopkeeper, a young student in a school house in Bihar.

And that warmth didn’t end on the embassy campus. Every Saturday, Kathryn would welcome people from the mission into her home to practice yoga with a teacher she hired.

She did this, mind you, even when she was out of town.

In Afghanistan, where she served as our acting Mission Director, she helped deliver critical food assistance to Afghans displaced by conflict and droughts by securing wheat from local food mills rather than foreign donors, thereby supporting the local economy.

And in DC, when Kathryn found herself leading internal communications during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, she devoted herself to supporting our local staff, our Foreign Service Nationals, as many of our foreign service officers returned to the U.S.

She worked to ensure that our local staff received all the information they needed to run an effective response to COVID-19 in their countries. But she also wanted to help them tell their stories—not just to help them do their work, but to help them share that work with the world.

What Kathryn realized is that despite the grim headlines we read about the state of the world, development is often the source of the good news. Lives saved. People healed. Rights secured. The real improvements in people’s lives.

And across 50 years of partnership with USAID, Bangladesh is full of bright headlines.

A national poverty rate that’s been cut in half. Maternal and child mortality slashed by two-thirds. Rice production tripled. Electricity brought to nearly half of the country’s population.

That’s not to say the country is without its challenges. Strengthening democratic institutions and workers and human rights protections are key priorities—right in line with Kathryn’s background as a democracy officer back in the day. As we have heard, COVID-19 is spreading as we work to help the country treat and vaccinate its people. Climate change is subjecting the country to sea level rises, storms, cyclones, droughts, landslides, and flooding. And Bangladesh is now home to the largest refugee settlement in the world, with nearly one million Rohingya Muslims who have fled from Burma.

Despite these obstacles, Bangladesh remains committed to becoming an upper middle-income country within 10 years.

They will have no better partner in reaching that goal than Kathryn.

I could leave you with a list of superlatives about Kathryn from her colleagues, but I’ll simply end with just one: “She’s the best.”

With that Kathryn, it’s my pleasure now to administer the oath.