[As Delivered]

It is genuinely an honor getting to work with such an extraordinary and talented leadership group.

And you know, my days are usually action packed here in the office. And then I go home to three young kids, including a lively, quasi-violent three-year-old child. And actually he is so energetic and active that he refuses to stand still. But the few times he does are when he himself experiences a mild fever or something, and then he is too tired to give me a hard time, and he just gives me a hug. And I think of that as a special moment.

And that is also why, about a week ago or so, I was really crushed when I heard this story of a young mother in Monrovia that I can’t get out of my head.

When her three-year-old son developed a high fever, she brought him to an Ebola treatment unit, and refused to leave his side.

She chose to walk into the isolation unit with him… to care for him, to bring him water, to wipe his brow.

Her son died, and before long, she too began exhibiting telltale signs of Ebola.

One of the most devastating facts of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa is that it strikes down the people who care the most.

The brothers and sisters who cradle their siblings.

The health workers who look after them.

The mothers and fathers who love their children unconditionally.

It’s tough to look around the world today and think about achieving great moral aspirations that we set for ourselves—like ending extreme poverty—when we face unprecedented and immediate humanitarian challenges, from West Africa to Syria to Iraq.

In the last several months, I have been deeply inspired by the seemingly bottomless capacity of our world’s humanitarians to head into the heart of yet one more crisis.

Our outstanding leader of those efforts is someone who you all know, Nancy Lindborg, who is right here.

Today, USAID’s disaster experts are leading four major global responses simultaneously, including in Liberia, where we’re applying enormous creativity and rigor to stop the epidemic.  

In fact, in our 53-year history, this is the greatest humanitarian burden we have ever carried simultaneously.

In the midst of middle-of-the-night calls with the field and complex coordination meetings with the U.S. military, I have been struck by how much I’m reminded of those early days after the tragic earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 2010.

It was the most catastrophic natural disaster in modern history. And it happened in an instant.

I was on the job less than 10 days at the time, and knew that America had to lead in bringing support to that nation.

We saved hundreds of lives in the largest urban search and rescue the world had ever seen; and launched the largest food distribution in history.

In fact, within months, water was cleaner in Port-au-Prince than it had been before the crisis and the diarrheal disease rate 4-6 months after the earthquake was lower than it was the day before the earthquake.

Not everything we tried worked. And we know better than anyone the challenges of succeeding in the midst of crisis and chaos.

But those experiences prepared us for today.

Against the outbreak of Ebola—just as in Haiti and the Philippines—USAID is marshaling the full weight, resources, and assets of the United States Government.

As President Obama said this week when we were together at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta, “We’re prepared… to provide the kinds of capabilities that only America has, and to mobilize the world in ways that only America can do.”

We need to do that now because an epidemic that started with tens, hundreds—now has thousands of infections. And that could quickly be tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Ebola cases in West Africa.

We need to mobilize nearly 3,000 American military personnel to provide the logistics and engineering backbone to an effort to build out thousands of bed-capacity in Ebola treatment units. And to reach every household in infected areas with effective community care and isolation to reduce the spread of this terrible disease.

And we have to innovate using some of the new tools we’ve pioneered together to ensure that our scientists are developing vaccines and new drugs, our designers of protective equipment are delivering better forms of that basic commodity that is so critical to the effectiveness of this response.

Now since the Haiti earthquake, I’ve come to realize that there is something about the clarity of crisis that makes our jobs easier.

You act with intensity, focus, and rigor because you have to. Lives are at stake. Speed is essential. It’s exhilarating and physically exhausting.

But doing this every day—in a federal agency with a breadth of global responsibilities of USAID that stretches from improving tax collection in Afghanistan to fighting crime in the Northern Triangle....   

… now that is the real challenge. 

But just as our response to Haiti, the Philippines, and—now Ebola—demonstrate, development is simply too important to our nation’s foreign policy, national security, and economic future to let our mission atrophy.

The truth is that the poverty, instability, and the sheer human need we are witnessing today challenge us to bring greater—not less—commitment to this mission.

Time and again, we’ve seen the intersection of extreme corruption, extreme poverty, and extreme climate push millions to the edge of survival and challenge our own sense of security and prosperity.

That is why, in two successive State of the Union addresses, President Obama has clearly and directly called on us to lead the world to end extreme poverty in our lifetime.

The President is not alone in his vision for development.

This field has, in fact, always attracted the greatest of hearts and the most talented of minds. We simply had to give them the political support, budget flexibilities, and global platform necessary to succeed.

And you only have to look around this room tonight to see the transformation that is taking place here at USAID.  Or to walk through the incredible Innovation Marketplace next door, which is open all day tomorrow, to see how far we’ve come and how strong we can be when we embrace the greatest capabilities this country has to offer.

But the most important thing we’ve done has not been rebuilding this Agency, or recapturing the budgets. It’s actually been harnessing the partnership and the power of science and business, and pointing that capacity against the ills of extreme poverty.

Instead of just hiring a contractor to build a road or writing a check to deliver vaccines, we are trying to create an open platform to connect our brightest minds to our toughest challenges.

In Ethiopia, as Minister Tedros knows well, we are working with DuPont scientists and local farming cooperatives to increase yields for 35,000 maize farmers. The government is doing its part. They’ve liberalized the seed sector and invested in local science and agriculture and partnered with Feed the Future’s innovation labs, which now exist on 24 American college campuses.

Today, President Obama’s Feed the Future initiative has improved nutrition for 12 million children and helped nearly 7 million farmers grow their way out of poverty. Country leaders are making tough reforms, and 200 companies have committed more than $10 billion in new investments for participating countries.

Once one of the most food insecure countries in the world, Ethiopia has driven stunting rates down by a stunning 4 percent in just three years. As a result, 160,000 children are laughing, playing, and learning—free from the devastating effects of hidden hunger.

This success has inspired us all—even our colleagues who work down the street.

And earlier today, a bipartisan group led by Senators Casey and Johanns and Representatives Smith and McCollum, stepped forward to introduce Feed the Future into law—a powerful statement of bipartisan support for the fight against hunger.

I will say, our leg team is led by Chuck Cooper. Getting these types of efforts authorized helps to ensure that they will exist for as long as it takes to ensure that we will live in a world without child death, without child hunger, without extreme poverty.

We’ve taken this new model of partnership to scale in other areas—in child survival, in resilience, in education and in power.

In November, we closed a deal to build one of the largest wind power generation farms in sub-Saharan Africa. By 2017, 38 powerful turbines built by GE will capture wind energy coursing through the plains of central Kenya and add enough power to light 150,000 homes.

For decades, endemic corruption and notoriously poor governance and the inability to sign deals on the other end of the project stymied energy sector development—and created a cement ceiling on Africa’s potential to reduce poverty and growth.

In the past, we would have stepped in by ourselves—to provide the financing and build the infrastructure.

Today, President Obama’s Power Africa initiative is pioneering a fundamentally different path—a public-private partnership that uses a range of tools, from risk insurance to off-grid energy technology, to attract private investors and help countries make energy sector reforms.

The response has been stunning.

In just over one year, we’ve mobilized $26 billion for energy investments in Africa.

At the African Leaders Summit, President Obama announced we are tripling our goal to capture this momentum and bring electricity to more than 60 million homes and businesses on that continent.

From partnering with Procter & Gamble to bring clean water to communities in rural Burma to helping launch a local tech company in Haiti that’s producing e-tablets that are now sold in the global market, this new model of development is not only delivering results today. It is providing a roadmap for how to solve some of the most challenging problems we will continue to face even more so tomorrow.

Yet our success is far from assured.

In a world of fierce competition, we have to earn the right to lead every single day. And unless we seek to evolve and get better, many of our partners—including the countries we celebrate today—will simply look elsewhere for solutions and partnership.

It was easier 50 years ago when this agency was founded. Countries had fewer options; and the western world was the unquestioned leader in private capital, technical expertise, and the experience of inclusive growth.

Today, that’s been turned on its head and countries have far more choices, as private capital flows far outpace government spending and emerging powers around the world are taking development extraordinarily seriously as a core element for how they intent to protect their national security and economic prosperity.

Every time I visit Africa, I drive by Libyan-built government buildings in Mali or watch a plane full of Turkish businessmen come off a flight in Mogadishu. 

In five years, Turkey has doubled its overseas assistance, and Brazil has more embassies in Africa than the United Kingdom does.

The international loan value of the China Development Bank is already greater than the World Bank globally combined, and the value of South-South trade is now exceeding that of the value of North-South trade for the first time in our global history.

Established earlier this year, the decision to establish the BRICS development bank in Shanghai is a signal that in fact the future will be different. It will be more competitive. With different types of economic and development models on offer to build the tight economic partnerships that then last for decades and generations.

Now, many have criticized the United States because our model of partnership comes with conditions. And sometimes as a result, it is slower and less able to capitalize on opportunities. We need to improve that. This is not a perfect model, but it is accountable—shaped by our own struggle to live up to our own ideals.

We defend human rights and democracy as we do this work because we have known the despair of institutionalized injustice.

We build accountable companies and institutions guided by the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act because we have known the temptations of corruption.

And we thrill in open global competition that abides by the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative because we have known the predation of monopolies.

At the other end of this spectrum, companies and countries profit openly from illegal land grabs; public resources disappear all too often into private hands; and corruption still accounts for a tremendous amount of failure on behalf of the world’s extremely poor people.

This corrosive way of working diminishes our faith not only in government—but in each other.

In emerging economies, these two approaches often compete side-by-side, as leaders from Nigeria to Ukraine to Indonesia explore their options.

This competition presents them with an opportunity and a challenge.

As countries chart their own course, our engagement can help steer their growth in positive directions, while encouraging their own expanded responsibilities on the global economic stage.

Today, we increasingly prioritize trilateral partnerships with China on climate change and energy; with Brazil on food security and nutrition; India on technological innovation and health; South Korea on health and science; and Mexico on agricultural initiatives and entrepreneurship. 

Far from a retreat of American leadership, these new model partnerships could become the world’s currency of choice—engaging American businesses in the markets of the future, while bringing along emerging powers and helping them adopt a set of standards that we all know would be more effective over the very long run.

These efforts work. Just think about where we were two decades ago.

Nepal was in the middle of an armed insurgency; Mozambique was mired in conflict; Burma was a ruthlessly closed society; and Colombia was a narco-state.

Today, in all of those cases, we’ve seen tremendous growth and transformation. And we’ve seen leaders in those countries make tough choices to forgo the quick riches of corruption and authoritarianism in order to embrace development, democracy, and economic transparency.

As a result, they’re setting the tone. They are the reason why, when we look at what extreme poverty will be in the future, we know it will be housed in fewer countries and countries that are basically more fragile.

So let’s be honest: not every country looks like Colombia or Tanzania.

Not every community has leaders who will make those right choices.

As more nations make policy decisions essential to good governance, the challenge before us will narrow—and toughen.

We know that the Liberias and Haitis of the world will be definitive in terms of where we need to work effectively if we really want to achieve the goal of this Frontiers meeting of ending extreme poverty.

In countries like Nigeria and Yemen, where the prospect of peace is undermined by extremism. And in countries like South Sudan, whose leaders too often make choices that bring their country yet again to the brink of famine.

There is a reason why a 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Haiti killed 300,000 people and an 8.8 magnitude earthquake barely impacted Chile.

There is a reason why a well-understood virus that has been contained more than 50 times in more than four decades is today devastating and threatening the national security and stability of an entire region that just a month ago, two months ago, we were celebrating their economic growth prospects right there in Washington, D.C.

The consequences of leadership decisions are more relevant and acute in fragile states, where there is a fundamental choice between allowing people to enrich themselves and building serious lasting institutions.

Our effort to end extreme poverty will largely fail or succeed based on whether we can all work together with those nations to help make the right choices. And so if we are going to achieve the goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030, we know what we have to do.

Those who set these international goals need to boldly adopt very clear focused and definitive aspirations for our world to end extreme poverty by 2030 with the reasonable tightly focused set of efforts that allow us to know if we’re actually getting there.

Those who lead partner countries will need to fight corruption and demand tough reforms, invest in their institutions, and make the choices to partner with those who will bring the prospect of growth with transparency and accountability.

Those of you who lead businesses, companies, entrepreneurial start-ups need to take greater risks to focus on the needs of the poor in markets that may not appear to be the most attractive right now but are actually the fastest growing markets anywhere in the world.

And those who lead development organizations like USAID and so many others have to constantly reinvent innovative new models that allow us not to do things the way we’ve always done them, but to do them the way we are now able to in a world transformed by science, entrepreneurship, innovation, and a desire to have your life mean something more.

Sixty years ago, when my grandfather dreamed of a better life for his children, he only had one choice to make. He emptied his retirement account and put my dad on a plane with a one-way ticket to the United States of America.

Today, folks in those positions have a lot of choices, their children can excel in any number of environments around the world—and that is a wonderful and hopeful reality.

But we still as Americans need to stand for something special. And so when our President stands up in the State of the Union or anywhere else and calls on us to lead a fight to end extreme poverty, we have to recognize that that is our responsibility, it is our opportunity, it is in our national security and economic interest, but it also speaks volumes about who we are.

Thank you.