The opportunity to strike a new grand bargain that leverages more efficient donor action to parallel changes and u. N. Agency so that collectively we are more strategic and more effective and more efficient and more nimble. We will also have the opportunity and the obligation to grapple headon with the sharp decline and adherence to basic humanitarian doctrine and the fact that the greatest impediment to reaching people in need in chronic conflicts today is the willful denial of humanitarian access by all parties. Second, in september, president obama will host a summit on refugees on the margins of the u. N. General assembly. Theres no question that the global refugee crisis putting the host countries to the test and it is also putting people to the test. Most refugees face futures without education or jobs or the hope of normalcy, often for a generation. Unfortunately, the debate on the global refugee crisis has sparked has been more about rhetoric. Some of it hateful than about solutions and the summit provides an opportunity to change that by challenging the world to commit to solutions to sustained humanitarian funding to the settlement and other legal channels and to enabling refugees to secure the protection, education and livelihoods they need for their families. Finally, let me come back to u. S. Aid. I am proud of where the agency is today, and i know that what the United States needs regardless of administration or party, and it was an effective, agile and impactful u. S. Aid and one thats ready to handle whatever the future brings. So i end where i began and leave you with the hope perhaps more easily offered by an administrator near the beginning and the end of her term. Its kind of interesting, that we can strike our own grand bargain. Weve shown a development is an endeavor backed by bipartisan commitment and we have shown that u. S. Aid can deliver. I have told members of congress with whom i have met that i will be transparent and accountable, a pledge made easier by the hard work and vigor that the men and women of u. S. Aid bring every day. Ive also said that i will not be shy about coming to congress to ask for what we need. We met with the former u. S. Aid administrations who span four administrators and Political Parties and each of whom maintains the same commitment to the agency that they held while . Office. Im looking at one of them as i say, i know they would agree, when i say that all of us across party lines and from one administration to the next must pledge to keep building a stronger u. S. Aid and one that delivers accountability and impact and earns flexibility and exchange. An agency with the agility and support it needs and the agency we need and the world deserves. It we meet these three challenges and we made the choice to invest in the future and not just the right now and we cannot show an air of progress. If we persist through the inevitable setbacks and shocks of the countrys transformation and well have capable and responsible partners. As we come together as a Global Community to say we can do better and do it and well have systems worthy of the complex and changing world. The men and women of u. S. Aid with whom i am proud to serve are proud to lead and with you by our side. Thank you very much. [ applause ] can you hear me . Three techsavvy people. I will start off. Gail, thank you very much for that address. Thank you very much, george. I want to pick up on a theme that you started talking about before we all came out here. And that both senators talked about because the venue bier here in this audience, i really want to put an exclamation point on the issue of a bipartisan nature of foreign assistance, and you talked about it, and i think at this stark political period were in. Its really striking how over the past 15 years theres been a common support and backing for the range of initiatives that have been undertaken and in addition to what you say i look at the signature aspects of the Millennium Challenge Corporation and the transparency, the ownership and the evaluation, accountability, and this administration really largely under your leadership took those themes and concepts and took them from one agency and spread them across the whole foreign assistance program. You mention electrify africa which the Republican Congress enacted and youve got the foreign assistance accountability and Transparency Act which is past the house and is hopefully poised to pass the senate and tonight the Senate Foreign relations takes up the legislation that would enact into law this administrations feed the future program. And all of your consultations during you, you say you never had to make the argument with foreign assistance. Why do we have this strong support for foreign assistance and how can we tie that into what you call for which is a grand bargain of Greater Transparency and accountability in exchange for more flexibility and agility for the agency . Well, i will say i find it really striking and its one of the things about this job that is quite pleasurable that literally in no meeting did i say developments are really important and theres this agency called and i think theres room in pursuit of development for everybody regardless of what your point of entry is. Some people are behind it given that its an expression of our values. Some because it makes economic good sense and some because its a National Security impairment. I think we have also been able to show mcc from the beginning. I think u. S. Aid is doing an extraordinary job at this now, and agencies across the board that it works. You can show the actual results of good investments. I think its greater awareness that it matters and were seeing evidence of what happens when the world is not making the investments and development that you need to make. So i think theres a basis for the bipartisan support that is rooted in a lot of fact and a lot of evidence. Any administration serving in washington needs a strong u. S. Aid and the Administration Needs a strong u. S. Aid. To have a strong u. S. Aid it is the steward of taxpayers money. Im aware of that every day. I think all of us are as we figure out who we are and how we do it. In order for it to be as nimble and agile as it needs to be in a world changing as quickly as this one is, i think earning the flexibility that will allow us to be nimble and agile is something we should all strive for and i think there is a willingness to do that and there is a willingness on the part of u. S. Aid to see results and one of the great things about evaluations, sometimes they show you can do things really well and they say keep doing it. Sometimes they show that one of your assumptions was wrong and you need to take a midcourse correction and thats what happens, and sometimes they show that it sounded like a good idea, but maybe it didnt work. Stop. That builds confidence. So it is my hope that we have the confidence and the recognition and the need to over time provide this agency the flexibility it needs to be the agency they think we need. Thank you. That was a great talk. Thank you all very much for being here. I want to tug on the threads of the things that you talked about in your address. You mentioned private capital and systemic Public Private partnerships and rules of law. Theres a lot. Music to my ears. I think one of the things that is clear to anybody who cares about the transformation of the developing world is the understanding that and entrepreneurship are the things that, first of all, give peoples lives meaning and secondly allow them to propel themselves and theyre changing their lives themselves and that requires, that obviously requires the kind of systems in place that permit that, and i know that theres been a huge change in focus at a. I. D. From the old days and think about handing out money as a metric and the handing out food is a metric and youre so much more than that now, and perhaps you can talk a little bit about this transformation and think about whether a. I. D. Is optimally configured and is it an organization that can propel the centrality of this Public Private partnership and this emphasis on markets and on entrepreneurship into the next generation and really change the way that the way that business is done overseas . Yes and no. Yes in the sense that i think aid has proven over many years to adapt very well. To work on increasing public capital flows which is basically what part of the mission is, whether its entrepreneurs, whether it is larger businesses and whether its domestic investment or Foreign Investment is now pretty much in the dna of the agency and i find, with all of the Mission Directors i meet in almost every regional bureau. Its something that missions do. It is something that the leaders do to provide initial capital to entrepreneurs and innovators and to get those things started and i think and some of it has to do with the partnerships themselves and when i said this notion of what is a systemic publicprivate partnership. There are extraordinary partnerships across the agency and all over the world that bring local partners and u. S. Aedz. The question is in some of these can we look at the kind of scale that might come from looking systemically at water. Systemically at some of the areas that we work where i think we have the potential to take it to the next level. To optimize the ability of the agency and there are things that we could or should do over the coming years to give it greater capability to do that . Absolutely yes. Absolutely yes. Can i just follow up and ask you, the one thing that i think is probably confusing more from the outside and less for us in a long time, Washington People is how a. I. D. As it shifts into this area and m. C. C. And opec and all of the other organizations that are focused on not dissimilar things and how do you Work Together. There is a lot of work that we do in global health, for example, that is helping provide the Health Services build the capacity for Health Services that is not predominantly a private capital exercise. You know, its interesting and i was able to work on this a lot when i was at the nsc about how do we bring together the compliment that exists among multiple agencies and power africa is one of the best examples of that and what we have been able to do and aid is privileged to be the coordinator of this, but weve got every agency in the government that has a capability in this area. We all came together and what does each agency have to contribute and how do we bring those together rather than having multiple agencies doing a little bit on energy, poverty here and a little bit on regulatory policy there. I think weve found some ways to bring that complimentarity together and we work with mcc very often on a kind of bilateral basis when they are developing compacts in certain countries and empower africa, again, weve been able to bring mcc which may have a major compact and u. S. Aid which provides coordination and a great deal of assistance and transaction advisers and opec that has been able to provide Risk Insurance and other tools and the department of energy which has got expertise. Its about bringing the complimentarity together and i think theres one other thing. The president ial policy directive on Global Development that we did in the first term. On the surface it sounds like thats just a piece of paper and it sounds obvious. What i did through the course of a ninemonth study that preceded it and the promulgation and the agencies acting on it was, i think, brought together agencies in a way that is noncompetitive and complimentary and its working and im gooding head nods. Gail, you talked about local ownership which has been a Key Initiative and focus to the administration of aid across the programs and you also reference domestic resource mobilization and both of them are aimed at building up the local capacity of government and nongovernmental institutions and give us the rational for local ownership and the role that domestic resource mobilization can play in that. And ownership is a prerequisite for the entire enterprise. Now youve got varying degrees of local ownership in the political sense and i think one of the great things were seeing, i mentioned feed the future, for example. We were able to build that on a commitment that was made by African Leaders to increase spending on agriculture and everybody, all countries having a plan. Local ownership in another sense means working with local partners and in that, i think its extremely important because we kind of get a twofer out of that. We are able to contribute and help the Development Process and work with partners that themselves are developing as our partners and building capacity. And it is early days in a lot of cases and we have found, for example, that a subject that sounds like it would not be the most exciting for a major conference or event, how can we have Effective Tax Administration administrations and its one of the issues that comes up a great deal. It comes up along the financing for Development Agreement where a lot of countries are saying we need to figure out ways to develop Revenue Streams that will enable us to fund our budgets including health and education that for a long time have been financed with foreign aid. Its not a major amount of assistance on the part of the United States to help build that capacity. Its often Technical Assistance and other means, but were seeing in health increased expenditure by many, many governments on health. Were seeing a lot of government again and look at what they need to do to mobilize their own Revenue Streams. Were looking at a lot of local financing and the local banks and finance institutions to support entrepreneurs and i think the trend line weve seen over the years in assistance becoming a lesser share of the total. I think domestic resource, the domestic resource share will grow significantly and i think we would be wise to do as much as we can to do that and where a lot of the emphasis, and enhancing government revenues and the tax system to helping generate and mobilize private capital also. Absolutely. Absolutely. And we have been able to mobilize private capital and a percentage of that is domestic private capital which is the other piece of this which and thats critically important and i think its Domestic Companies and including small entrepreneurs and its the Small Businesses that make them grow makes a huge difference. Thank you. I wouldnt be doing my job if i didnt ask you a hard question. Okay. But we are going to after i bogart the microphone for another minute, we are going to open things up to folks so in the time we have remaining, think of your very, very clever and penetrating questions and well turn to the audience. Gail, i want to ask you, you mentioned something which gave me more fodder here. You mentioned attending the world humanitarian summit in istanbul and they had the biggest and most independent newspaper and theyre vying with reg i want and a couple of other countries to have the most journalists in prison than any other country and i know theyre a nato partner and they are suffering from the inflow of refugees, but you talked about that and theres we talked about egypt and egypt is one of the largest amounts of assistance and we tried to use that in ways that are productive for us and the egyptians and theyre more than 10,000 Political Prisoners in egypt and there are a lot of political backsliding as well as not a lot of economic reform thats happening that is really necessary to the current governors success and you can go on here. And i know this is a tough one and a lot of it rests on policy decision and help us understand how you are able to operate in this environment and how you would address people who look at this and say what the hell are we doing giving money to people. Youre right. All of those are cases that this is a matter of our Foreign Policy, but ill tell you how ive thought about ittttt a lot of this has come from being able to spend time with the agencies in that its different from some of the other environments and thats to think about im always thinking in buckets, but let me tell you about three. Q bucket buckets and one bucket is the work that u. S. Aid does and thats the development and were in cases where the conditions are aligned, where youve got a very, very good chance of achieving sustained gains across the board and thats a huge portion of what we do. A second bucket is the crisis prevention response and mitigation and those are the places where through things like resilience and other work that we do, we are trying to prevent, obviously, but then manage crises as they occur and do a great deal of response, but the third is those places where we work where as a matter of Foreign Policy and National Security we have a presence and we have a need to impact the Development Agenda in some positive manner, but where, quite frankly, it is much harder and the conditions are not always aligned and it may not always be a priority it is in some other environments and the security conditions were often extremely tough for our people to move around and in those cases i would be dishonest if i said it isnt much harder to achieve progress and there i think weve got records in some cases where we have been able to achieve gains that are slowly and it is slower in those environments oftentimes to build up the progress and some cases where its proven much more difficult. Our job in aid in those environments is to do two things. One is to identify those areas where you can make the gains where regardless of the sick stances i think we would all agree there critically important, that in egypt o