USAID head acknowledges corruption as hurdle in climate change funding for developing nations

In an interview with Yahoo News, Samantha Power, administrator for the United States Agency for International Development, said President Biden's pledge to donate $3 billion annually to help developing nations adapt to climate change was a crucial commitment, and addressed corruption as a hurdle in some countries.

Video transcript

DAVID KNOWLES: Let's talk about in developing nations that are going to be hit with these climate-change effects the hardest, there's also an overlapping problem with corruption. So how can Americans be assured that the funds that they donate won't just go down the drain or get used in a way that's not going to really do what it's supposed to do?

SAMANTHA POWER: Yeah, and I think there's more salience to that question in light of what has happened recently in Afghanistan, seeing the investment of so many resources over such a long period of time and feeling, at least in the governmental sector, as if, you know, none of those investments made a dent in the corruption problem.

I will say that in the Afghan context, those investments made a huge difference in terms of maternal mortality and infant mortality, in terms of girls education. But the core issue of corruption really impeded the kind of state building that many Afghans had hoped would happen in that 20-year period.

So that's on people's minds as we, you know, toss around these very large numbers and make these substantial commitments. I think that it's really important for donor countries to do what USAID in the United States have done, which is to elevate the anticorruption agenda, really, and mainstream it across development financing.

And that is something that USAID is doing actually for the first time this year. President Biden is the first American president to declare fighting corruption a national-security imperative. And, of course, as you know, he considers the climate crisis a national-security threat, so they're very, very related.

In the short term, you know, you have to have a lot of auditing, a lot of vetting. You have to work with trusted partners. USAID has relationships with many developing countries that date back the entire 60 years of our history. We have missions in 80 countries. I think there is a sense of where money can be well spent and where there is a risk of waste, fraud, or other forms of abuse.