[SPEAKER_03]: This episode of One Hoss is brought to you by the Hoss Fund, feeling opportunities for our students, faculty, and strengthening our host community.
[SPEAKER_03]: Join us in making an impact today at hoss.berkeley.edu forward slash give.
[SPEAKER_03]: Welcome to the one-horse alumni podcast.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm your host, Sean Lee, and today we're joined by Christina Karen's.
[SPEAKER_03]: Christina is a recent grad of R&BA program.
[SPEAKER_03]: She started during the pandemic in twenty-twenty and graduate in twenty-twenty-two.
[SPEAKER_03]: You are currently the director at the US International Development Finance Corporation.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know what that is.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm really curious to find out how many Americans do.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's fine.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I am a director there many, so just a title.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's awesome.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, first off, Christina, welcome to the podcast.
[SPEAKER_03]: So excited to have you here today.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks, Sean.
[SPEAKER_00]: Glad to be here.
[SPEAKER_03]: We like to start these conversations hearing about your origin story, you know, learning about where you're from, you know, where you're born, high grew up, sometimes if it's relevant, even hearing about your parents.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so it was actually preparing me quite well for this topic from the tell me about yourself classes that we had we didn't have to, but the tell me about yourself classes that we took and I thought those were great.
[SPEAKER_02]: And my one minute speel about my background was I am a fifth generation Californian.
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow.
[SPEAKER_02]: Born and raised in the Central Valley into a ranching family that traditionally raised citrus.
[SPEAKER_02]: I grew up near in the foothills near Sequoia National Park and from an early age was raised running around in the orange groves and going up to the mountains every summer my dad would take my two older brothers and I back packing for a few days and give my mom some rest before she started teaching school again in the fall and
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that really shaped me in many ways.
[SPEAKER_02]: My love for the outdoors, appreciation for nature, cold clear water, fresh air, not always the things that you get down in the valley.
[SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, it was a pretty ideal of childhood.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's amazing.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a fifth generation that, I mean, I just googled this.
[SPEAKER_03]: California was founded in eighteen fifty.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so my great, great grandfather.
[SPEAKER_02]: He came over from Scotland, hence my last name via Australia.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know if there's a connection to Karen's Australia or not, but you know, the record show.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, we'll see about that.
[SPEAKER_02]: But came through San Francisco and he was actually a sheep farmer.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so he headed into the Central Valley to start farming sheep and raising sheep.
[SPEAKER_02]: and ended up sticking around and planting various crops and he actually sunk the first well in Teleri County.
[SPEAKER_02]: So there's actually a spot still named after our family and the house where my grandfather was raised is still there.
[SPEAKER_02]: So long routes, yeah, in the industry in the area.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's amazing.
[SPEAKER_03]: How did you make your way out of the valley?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's a good question.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I am the youngest of three.
[SPEAKER_02]: And my two older brothers also went to Stanford.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we have some family history there and also my step grandma and my uncle and some others also went to Stanford.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so somehow some way I made it in.
[SPEAKER_02]: And my mom was a school teacher, high school school teacher.
[SPEAKER_02]: So she really imbued in us from an early age or embedded in us from an early age, the importance of academics.
[SPEAKER_02]: but also being well rounded.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I started trying out sports when I was little and none of them really stuck.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was terrible at land sports.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I trade swimming.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's what I actually just got out of the pool earlier today.
[SPEAKER_02]: I still do it and I love it.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm glad I found that.
[SPEAKER_02]: But you know, she really excited us about the prospect of
[SPEAKER_02]: World travel and her brother was in the Peace Corps in Afghanistan.
[SPEAKER_02]: In the seventies before the fall of the show of Iran, when it was a very different place back then, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: It was the bread basket of the region, women had a lot more freedom than they do now, very different.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so hearing his stories about doing that work in Afghanistan, I think in some way inspired me when I was little.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so when I went to college, I majored in international relations and
[SPEAKER_03]: make sense.
[SPEAKER_02]: I didn't really know what I wanted to do, so after that I went into consulting and really wasn't a good fit.
[SPEAKER_02]: In Silicon Valley I was doing IT tech consulting, but at the same time I was researching Peace Corps the whole time, you know, and I eventually found my true calling with USAID and my career there.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I had a roundabout way to get there.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I also realized during my early career how much I really wanted to get into environmental cause protection and conservation.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I didn't do any science courses undergrad because of my major.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I went back to Berkeley actually.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I worked in a lab in Espen in the Environmental Science Policy Management Building.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I took classes so that I could get into grad school.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I went to the Brent School, UC Santa Barbara, which is a more interdisciplinary program.
[SPEAKER_02]: So it combined my background in
[SPEAKER_02]: policy, but also gave me a strong foundation in the sciences.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so with that, I then started working, actually at the local level in California on oil and gas, believe it or not, land use planning.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I was mostly working on mitigation from all the oil and gas development down there.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you don't know, that was actually where this start of the Clean Water Act came from because of the Santa Barbara oil spill back in nineteen sixty nine in the coastal commission.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was actually under Nixon, Nixon passed the Clean Air Act in Clean Water Act if I remember correctly and in response to a lot of these environmental disasters and one of the big ones was the Santa Barbara oil spill.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so the California Coastal Commission was set up during the seventies to regulate the oil and gas and development and
[SPEAKER_02]: land use development along the coast and so I ended up working there after working for Santa Barbara County still on oil and gas but also just coastal you know land use planning and permitting and then I went over this was during the two thousand seven two thousand eight like financial crisis and so the state of California was hurting and they were cutting stuff and they were cutting staff time so we were furloughed
[SPEAKER_02]: I was lucky enough to get a lateral transfer to another agency that was just starting called the California Ocean Protection Council, which is still going and doing great work.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I got to do more policy then.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was really eager to get back into conservation policy.
[SPEAKER_02]: got to draft some legislation and work on the first plastic bag ban policy in California and figuring that out.
[SPEAKER_02]: Aquaculture and some other interesting challenging topics at the time related to fisheries and
[SPEAKER_02]: conservation in general and also around that time it was when we were there was a lot of interest in re protected areas the marine life protection act was passed in California creating marine reserves all up and down the coast that had been earlier in the two thousands and when I was at brand in grad school I actually focused on coastal marine resource management I focused on the lobster fishery in Santa Barbara and so
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, that translated over throughout that part of my career.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then I ended up moving over to Noah and worked in their coastal services center for while on, you know, implementing the national ocean policy, which President Obama created.
[SPEAKER_02]: So it was a really exciting time just to be a part of all of that implementation, you know, of these policies that were at the time quite groundbreaking.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so,
[SPEAKER_02]: I was happy, you know, I was living in the Bay Area, I had a really cool career going, but I still felt that pull that I wanted to do something abroad internationally.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, friend of mine, who was NDC, who I grew up with, pointed me towards this job window for foreign service officers at USAID.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it was during the Obama administration, Secretary Clinton decided she wanted to double the size of the foreign service for state and aid.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so they had this big hiring surge.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I was lucky to get in on the tail end of that in, in, in, in, twelve.
[SPEAKER_02]: And right before his reelection and there was funding.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I got to travel a lot.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was posted on the short-term assignments.
[SPEAKER_02]: I worked three months in South Africa, two months in East Tmore.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you don't know where that is, it's right next to Indonesia, kind of between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.
[SPEAKER_02]: And two months in Bangkok focused on just Southeast Asia climate change adaptation programming there.
[SPEAKER_02]: I worked on wildlife conservation in South Africa, wildlife trafficking and some other initiatives.
[SPEAKER_02]: In East humor, I was looking a lot of agriculture.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a high rate of malnutrition there and stunting children and trying to diversify crop production and looking at various ways that they can improve nutrition outcomes there.
[SPEAKER_02]: So it was great.
[SPEAKER_02]: I got to really see a lot.
[SPEAKER_02]: I went to Brazil for a couple of weeks and worked on the biodiversity program design for the Amazon, which was way too short.
[SPEAKER_02]: I would have loved to spend more time there.
[SPEAKER_02]: But really just kind of implementing some of these things I had been learning, but not really on the ocean and coastal side.
[SPEAKER_02]: It wasn't until I got my first assignment, permanent assignment as a Foreign Service officer.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was actually posted to Barbados.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I covered ten small island developing states, and then two northern Amazon countries, Guyana and Surinam.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I got to work on climate change adaptation, you know, looking at how to protect communities from sea level rise and storm surge during
[SPEAKER_02]: increase storm events because of climate change dealing with drought impacts these small islands.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's really difficult to collect rainfall especially when it's erratic, hard to predict and less frequent.
[SPEAKER_02]: And working with communities to understand their needs
[SPEAKER_02]: At the tail end, or towards the end of that time, I got to work more in the Amazon and look at indigenous rights issues.
[SPEAKER_02]: We looked a lot at illegal mining, goal mining and mercury poisoning in the rivers, looking at conservation plans and serenom.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think the country is more than ninety percent forested, which is an impressive number, but it's, you know, it's under a lot of pressure from illegal logging and also mining.
[SPEAKER_02]: as well as just you know sea level rise and their mangroves are disappearing they're being deforested as well and those are the natural protective barrier for communities that are facing a rising sea and increasing storm surge from you know just heavy wave action and so trying to get more funding for mangrove restoration in those areas which it was naturally geared for but you know it just been cleared to make way for levees and these hard infrastructure solutions that
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, it really convinced me of the value of nature-based solutions and why they're so important because they're a win-win for biodiversity, for coastal protection.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's really, it was a whole different spin on what I had been looking at from the California Point of View and the Coastal Commission where so much of our coast is
[SPEAKER_02]: murdered with rip wrap and hard infrastructure and we don't have we have some great beaches but there's a lot of sand you know replenishment that happens on those beaches we break up the seaweed we change the ecosystem a lot and so it was really interesting to be in these places where they're facing those impacts for the often the first time in some of these communities right Christina you know as a lay person
[SPEAKER_03]: What you just talked about sounds like a hundred lifetimes of work.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's almost, you've been everywhere.
[SPEAKER_03]: How are you in so many places and doing so many things, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: And so many different ways, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: First off, what is a foreign service officer?
[SPEAKER_03]: What is it that you do?
[SPEAKER_03]: Are you, you know, can you hear hands dirty?
[SPEAKER_03]: Are you doing the research?
[SPEAKER_03]: Like what is the foreign service officer?
[SPEAKER_02]: What is it?
[SPEAKER_02]: And a lot of people say, are you part of state department?
[SPEAKER_02]: That's a different, different foreign service than the USA foreign service, which state you take a test.
[SPEAKER_02]: A very difficult test.
[SPEAKER_02]: You have to pass it a certain percentile to make the cut.
[SPEAKER_02]: USA, I had to do a test, but it was a written and in-person panel.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I was lucky enough to get chosen.
[SPEAKER_02]: When I joined, there was a saying that it was harder to join the foreign service, and it was to get into Harvard.
[SPEAKER_02]: the acceptance rate was less than one percent.
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I felt very honored, but at the same time I felt like, you know, there's some very down-to-risk people that are working down.
[SPEAKER_02]: These aren't elitists.
[SPEAKER_02]: I should say college grads, like you might find it a Harvard or Stanford, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: These are people who have worked in
[SPEAKER_02]: health, education, environmental agencies and NGOs.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I just really, I found my calling in a sense there, I really liked the people who I worked with.
[SPEAKER_02]: But the Foreign Service in and of itself is this mechanism that was set up when the State Department was created.
[SPEAKER_02]: It basically places people overseas in embassies and, in our case, USAID, they're called missions.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're much smaller than an embassy.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're now embedded in the embassies that used to often be a separate building.
[SPEAKER_02]: But now the staffer, well, I guess I should say the staff were embedded in the State Department before USAID was dismantled earlier this year.
[SPEAKER_02]: And they are the development arm.
[SPEAKER_02]: We have the three leg, we used to have a three-legged stool for American foreign policy and influence, and it was defense, which, I mean, most people are familiar with, diplomacy, the second D diplomacy for the State Department, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: have negotiations with foreign governments, both bilateral, multilateral, we issue visas, do consular services.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you go on travel, you go on a trip to another country.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you get in trouble, you can always call somebody to embassy and there's an emergency.
[SPEAKER_02]: Hotline, I actually had a man that phone when I was based overseas, and you get some really terrifying calls from people.
[SPEAKER_02]: So that's an important function of our government.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then the third was development.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that was the non-military sphere of influence that the US wielded overseas.
[SPEAKER_02]: And basically to prevent wars, to prevent migration, to prevent poverty,
[SPEAKER_02]: We spent money through assistance, through foreign assistance.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think in the last year of USA debt totaled about forty two billion, some say forty five billion dollars, which is less than one percent of the whole US federal budget.
[SPEAKER_02]: The military budget on the other hand is easily over a third.
[SPEAKER_02]: I can't remember the exact statistics, but much higher.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I would say that diplomacy, without diplomacy, that number would be even higher on the defense side.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because what USA did was they worked with a lot of communities to improve
[SPEAKER_02]: health improve nutrition improve food production improve water and sanitation provision improve education improved environmental outcomes and it's frustrating to hear number one I don't think we did a very good job of publicizing the work that we did I think a lot of Americans had no idea
[SPEAKER_02]: what USAID was until they heard about it in the news.
[SPEAKER_02]: This February when it was ripped apart and they were told that it was an agency that had been corrupted and was basically just full of waste and fraud.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I would advise people to do their own research.
[SPEAKER_02]: Look, there's actually something called a deck, the DEC, where we had to put all of the project information
[SPEAKER_02]: where all of your taxpayer dollars were going for USAID work went into this database.
[SPEAKER_02]: It showed who the contractor grantee was, which are the main forms of how we get money out the door at USAID and then what that money was spent on.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I would encourage people to go look through that and to see what your taxpayer dollars were spent on.
[SPEAKER_02]: Some of the programs that were highlighted earlier this year as waste and fraud weren't even USAID programs.
[SPEAKER_02]: There was a lot of talk about like a transgender opera in Columbia.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that was actually funded by the State Department if I am remembering correctly.
[SPEAKER_02]: So some of these examples that were touted weren't even applicable to USAID.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's also extremely unfair to point to a list of ten projects, maybe even twelve and say this is waste and fraud.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you knew how many projects there were at USAID,
[SPEAKER_02]: Almost every single mission covers all of those sectors.
[SPEAKER_02]: In a hundred and eighty countries around the world, we had missions and people on the ground.
[SPEAKER_02]: And those people gave up their lives in many ways.
[SPEAKER_02]: In some cases literally gave up their lives.
[SPEAKER_02]: We've had colleagues who've died in Afghanistan and basically in really difficult operating environments.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're putting themselves and their families in harm's way.
[SPEAKER_02]: Almost everybody I know has been affected in some way, shape or form, whether it's being evacuated during a coup, or being pulled to a sickness, like Ebola, or some other form of instability.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so that's really hard when you have young kids, some people have their parents with them, and just on your own psyche to know that you're trying to do something good for your country.
[SPEAKER_02]: And when all of this happened earlier this year,
[SPEAKER_02]: It felt like we were at war with our own country.
[SPEAKER_02]: It felt like our government was attacking us, was attacking USAID after they had already given so much.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm not just talking about foreign service officers.
[SPEAKER_02]: There are many local staff who gave up a lot.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, they face scrutiny from their own governments in their countries.
[SPEAKER_02]: They faced hardship in doing those jobs.
[SPEAKER_02]: They worked on things that weren't popular.
[SPEAKER_02]: They worked on transgender rights, you know, in places like Uganda, where that's against the law or, you know, DEI efforts.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I hate to say that term now because I feel like I'm going to be flagged.
[SPEAKER_02]: But these were people who were putting themselves also in harm's way on a daily basis.
[SPEAKER_02]: And they had to go home and live there and they did these jobs for twenty, thirty years.
[SPEAKER_02]: in hopes that they would eventually be able to qualify for a visa to come to the US in some cases because of that service.
[SPEAKER_02]: So it was, like I said, it felt like people who have worked at USA, I'm currently working at USA were under attack.
[SPEAKER_02]: And without any form of recognition of the sacrifices that they had made.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I get really dumped up about that because it's not being I know it's being covered by some media outlets, but it's that's why I was asking about your podcast because I feel like those stories are are not coming through.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
[SPEAKER_02]: And there are a lot of people who
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, some people posted on LinkedIn, I actually linked to a company of stories that Foreign Service officers had submitted just short paragraphs of their career and how it ended and what that meant to them.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thousands of people.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, there were two thousand, almost two thousand Foreign Service officers at USAID.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think, as many local staff, I don't know, I'd have to check the numbers, but several thousand local staff, and then all of the contractors and grantees who were working with USAID.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think the number that's being thrown around is around ten thousand staff total that have been let go.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's not even talking about the beneficiaries of their work.
[SPEAKER_02]: So hearing stories about people in South Africa who were being approached by
[SPEAKER_02]: Taxi drivers or people on the street saying, oh, you work at USA.
[SPEAKER_02]: Can you please have your government restart my clinic because I need my anti-retroviral drugs and if I don't get them, then I will be able to pass on AIDS to somebody else.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I don't want to do that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I need the treatment to improve my own health.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, heartbreaking stories.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm sure you've read about, you know, bags of rice and feed.
[SPEAKER_02]: for hungry people, starving people.
[SPEAKER_02]: I myself work now at the DFC, I cover Western Central and Southern Africa, and now also East Asia.
[SPEAKER_02]: But as a relationship manager, and I work with banks and microfinance institutions to increase access to finance for smaller farmers, for women, for entrepreneurs.
[SPEAKER_02]: And in talking to, we work closely with USAID because they provide the technical assistance to help get that money out the door to people and the right organizations that need it.
[SPEAKER_02]: And in talking to one in Nigeria, she said, you know, we're working with the bank to finance
[SPEAKER_02]: A company that's producing peanut paste and peanut paste is really useful for humanitarian settings for malnutrition because it's chock full of calories and you can put a lot of vitamins and essential nutrients into it.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's called ready to use therapeutic foods, our UTF.
[SPEAKER_02]: They produce our UTF peanut paste.
[SPEAKER_02]: But they got the financing to purchase all the equipment to produce it.
[SPEAKER_02]: But now they don't have a market because the donors are pulling out.
[SPEAKER_02]: Unicef might not be able to purchase it because they don't have the money from the US funding anymore.
[SPEAKER_02]: Other donors are pulling back their aid.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we're seeing that there's not going to be a market for these donors to purchase
[SPEAKER_02]: the RUTF foods to distribute to malnourished children, essentially.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I said, how many are going to be affected by this?
[SPEAKER_02]: And she said, eight hundred thousand.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: So when you hear these very real stories, and this is a drop in the bucket, and you think about the impacts of what that means worldwide, because somebody doesn't like the idea of a transgender opera in Colombia,
[SPEAKER_02]: It's astounding and it blows my mind whenever I think about it, which I try not to do every day because it's depressing, but these are the stories that need to be told.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right, not really appreciate you sharing these stories.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's so much I want to ask in terms of like, you know, what you think the impact doesn't even cover because there's gonna be so many angles of it, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: But I guess that's kind of an interesting segue into, well, I'm really curious, you know, why you decided to come back to Berkeley Hospital doing MBA.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then kind of how you ended up where you are now at the U.S.
[SPEAKER_03]: International Development Finance Corporation.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's a good question because it seems like a non-secreter.
[SPEAKER_02]: But it comes down to my personal life actually.
[SPEAKER_02]: And what I spoke about earlier in terms of people making sacrifices with their family,
[SPEAKER_02]: That was very real for me and I have aging parents.
[SPEAKER_02]: My husband, his parents were older and we have two young children.
[SPEAKER_02]: I had my son when I was posted in Barbados at my daughter and when I was in London on a telework arrangement with USAID working for Power Africa.
[SPEAKER_02]: Power Africa is a U.S.
[SPEAKER_02]: government initiative that covers basically
[SPEAKER_02]: It had about, I think, thirteen government agencies, and it was working to increase energy access in some inherent Africa for the three hundred million plus people that don't have access to electricity.
[SPEAKER_02]: Interesting.
[SPEAKER_02]: And when I took that job, I realized how much I needed to know more about
[SPEAKER_02]: How much I didn't know about finance and development finance.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so in the back of my head, I kept thinking, I really, I feel like I need an MBA to understand this.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so when my daughter was born, we decided to move back to the Bay Area where we have family and in hopes of spending more time together.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I knew my days at USA were probably numbered for that reason because we wanted to stay close to families, especially as our parents were getting older.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so there was that pressure to be close.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I figured, you know what, if I'm going to be back in the Bay Area, I am going to make the most of it.
[SPEAKER_02]: And there's
[SPEAKER_02]: some great academic institutions down for being one of them, Berkeley being the other, and some other ones as well.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I applied and got into the Executive MBA program and worked at Power Africa while I did my Executive MBA.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I would not recommend that necessarily when you have a one year old and a four year old and a full-time job.
[SPEAKER_02]: I made it and I probably wasn't the nicest person during that experience, but I tried to make the most of it.
[SPEAKER_02]: I also, I envied the full-time MBAs because they could just really soak everything in and sink into the experience.
[SPEAKER_02]: Meanwhile, I was traveling back and forth.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was during COVID, so we were remote for the first year and then in person the second year.
[SPEAKER_02]: which was great, but that first year was mostly on Zoom.
[SPEAKER_02]: So it helped in the sense that I was able to be with my family more than I would have otherwise.
[SPEAKER_02]: That really important time, you know, my daughter was really young, but I didn't get the full experience that I think would have been great to have at Haas.
[SPEAKER_02]: But it did help me figure out the difference between dead and equity.
[SPEAKER_02]: And a lot of these important tools and knowledge that you need is to really understand development finance.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, yeah, I was grateful to spend two years there and translate that into my next career move, which was the DFC and put those skills to work.
[SPEAKER_03]: And what is the DFC?
[SPEAKER_02]: So the DFC, the US International Development Finance Corporation, is America's DFI Development Finance Institution.
[SPEAKER_02]: That basically means that we were created under the first Trump administration as a reincarnation of OPIC, OPIC, the overseas-prived investment corporation, which was helping US businesses find more business overseas and, you know, basically facilitating two-way trade with other countries.
[SPEAKER_02]: And a piece of U.S.
[SPEAKER_02]: aid that focused on basically a lot of low-mortfolio guarantees, which are effectively guaranteeing lending from banks and finance institutions to improve access to finance.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so it was called the Development Credit Authority a piece of the U.S.
[SPEAKER_02]: aid that was merged with OPEC in twenty twenty under the Bill Act that President Trump signed.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the main focus of it was really to use a portion of foreign assistance in the US federal budget to invest in other companies outside of the US.
[SPEAKER_02]: Part of that reason was to create markets for American products and companies to grow overseas.
[SPEAKER_02]: But part of the reason was also purely for development, to improve the enabling environment, to work with state and the USAID for American businesses and to improve businesses overseas who can then
[SPEAKER_02]: basically provide improved economic outcomes and increase the level of the standard of living for people that they can purchase more goods, American goods, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'd say, we can argue about whether or not USA is altruistic because we really were part of the whole mechanism too.
[SPEAKER_02]: promote American diplomacy and democracy overseas.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's no secret that, you know, USAID was used for more covert activities in his earlier years, but, you know, in tandem with the development finance corporation, we were able to really facilitate
[SPEAKER_02]: access to finance in a number of sectors and a number of parts of society that don't typically have access to finance.
[SPEAKER_02]: So when I say access to finance, I mean if you want to purchase a tractor or a car or a house, you go to the bank and they say, okay, do you have any collateral to put down in case you default on that loan?
[SPEAKER_02]: Most people don't have the amount of collateral needed to secure a loan from a commercial bank, even in Africa.
[SPEAKER_02]: They will not get approved.
[SPEAKER_02]: So that's a huge barrier for companies entrepreneurs to grow and scale and put their ideas to good use.
[SPEAKER_02]: What we do is we put in place these risk reduction mechanisms or incentives for financial institutions to take on more risk, right, to lend to a farmer who doesn't have title to their land, but is still farming it because of antiquated titleing systems or what not, or to women who can't legally own land.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, anything they own is in their husband's name, so how are they going to get alone?
[SPEAKER_02]: We help
[SPEAKER_02]: facilitate or work with the banks and a lot of times microfinance institutions as well to open up that lending aperture and get that capital to people who will make really good use of it and grow their businesses and the repayment rates are
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, ninety, seven, ninety, eighty, ninety, nine percent on most of these loans.
[SPEAKER_02]: These are not risky borrowers in the sense of ROI.
[SPEAKER_02]: These are just risky borrowers in the sense that you don't know enough about their credit history because they don't have a credit history to look at.
[SPEAKER_03]: To begin with, I'm curious how, as an MBA, like how do you go about facilitating that?
[SPEAKER_03]: If I'm understanding this correctly, you're working with the local banks in those countries.
[SPEAKER_03]: Are you acting as a guarantor?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we guarantee, in many cases, it's paripassus.
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's an equal risk sharing agreement.
[SPEAKER_02]: So they take on fifty percent of any loss and we take on fifty percent of any loss.
[SPEAKER_02]: So with the guarantee, anytime there's a default, they have to satisfy certain thresholds, so there has to be final notice of payment or payment demand, letter sent, X number of days following that collection of efforts have to be proven.
[SPEAKER_02]: Things like that.
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's not that easy to just say, oh, they defaulted to give us money from the US government.
[SPEAKER_02]: They actually have to prove it through all of the paperwork.
[SPEAKER_03]: The other question is, how do you find these opportunities?
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm pretty sure these, let's say the women that you mentioned.
[SPEAKER_03]: They're not emailing the US government or you're a department saying, hey, we want to loan and our banks not giving to us, how do you find these gaps?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's a good question.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we have investment officers who do deal origination and structuring.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I will tell you that a lot of our deals came through USAID.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because USAID is in country.
[SPEAKER_02]: They know the banks.
[SPEAKER_02]: They know the financial ecosystem.
[SPEAKER_02]: They know companies.
[SPEAKER_02]: We have private sector, we had private sector engagement officers who would go out and talk to entrepreneurs and companies that are looking for debt financing.
[SPEAKER_02]: The other really interesting thing that we still have, but who knows for how long our business development people on the ground in Africa and they started rolling out more of those positions worldwide.
[SPEAKER_02]: But those people are based in Legos, Dakar.
[SPEAKER_02]: Legos Nigeria, Dakar Senegal, Johannesburg, South Africa, Nairobi, Kenya.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're scattered across the continent and they do such a great job of sourcing and identifying opportunities and fielding requests from banks or businesses and being the first line of opportunity
[SPEAKER_02]: to say is this going to meet the threshold for DFC financing and and I will say our thresholds are rather high right they have to be able to prove that they meet IFC performance standards for environmental and social governance and that's hard a lot of times for small business and so
[SPEAKER_02]: I actually attended a moderated panel yesterday on blended finance for San Francisco climate week and it was about a lot of the conversation was about taking on more risk and lowering the due diligence thresholds so that people can actually spend the money on their businesses and not on lawyers to draft agreements and figure out what we're requiring of them.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I will say it's not, the reputation is it's not always the easiest to work with a DFI like DFC because we're really financing big ticket deals like, you know, ten million, twenty million, fifty million in above.
[SPEAKER_02]: But our office that I said in and that came from USAID is the office of small business financial services.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we really focus on SMEs, micro small media enterprises.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the easiest way to get money out the doors through local financial institutions, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: We can't do all the due diligence ourselves.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so we rely on their credit officers, their loan officers to look at the requests for a loan.
[SPEAKER_02]: And they are the ones that make the decision.
[SPEAKER_02]: And when we do the guarantee, we have basic terms that they need to meet on interest rate has to be a market rate loan.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're not trying to undermine the market in any way shape or form.
[SPEAKER_02]: It has to be a minimum tenor of certain number of months.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we look at very basic things.
[SPEAKER_02]: We also look at impact measurement.
[SPEAKER_02]: Is this a woman-owned business?
[SPEAKER_02]: Is this a youth-owned business?
[SPEAKER_02]: Disabled owned.
[SPEAKER_02]: And a lot of our guarantees were focused on agriculture, education, energy, water and sanitation, health,
[SPEAKER_02]: All of these sectors that USAID was working in where we could rely on their expertise, but also leverage their technical assistance.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so most of our guarantees came with technical assistance from USAID, and that's all gone.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's really interesting.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, before we wrap up, is there anything that you want to kind of share that I didn't get to ask or touch upon?
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, you know, in sort of the lead up to this, you would said, how can podcasters or people listening to this help?
[SPEAKER_02]: Because you hear about this happening and the shutdown and the pause and then stop a foreign assistance.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I would say, you know, I don't think that calling our congressman is going to hurt, but you could do that.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not sure how much it'll help either at this point given what we're seeing happening.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I would say, do your research.
[SPEAKER_02]: and understand as much as you can.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's where I think doing more podcasts on people's stories who have been doing this work is important.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm actually pretty excited about a side project I'm working on with a couple of former USA colleagues.
[SPEAKER_01]: We submitted a proposal recently for funding.
[SPEAKER_01]: to pull together all of the information on terminated climate projects, actually, that were started by USAID with very basic information, such as the country it was in, what sector it was in, who the local partner was, what the project was aiming to do and how much financing or funding was left that it still needs and what the current stage is that it's in and whether it's shut down completely or can be restarted.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if it can be restarted, we really would like to get donors, foundations, impact investors, multilateral organizations like the World Bank or others to see that information on this platform and put it before them and say, you know, are you interested in continuing any of this work?
[SPEAKER_01]: This is work that has already been designed and vetted by the US government.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not to mention all of these people who are working on these programs are many of them still available if you'd like them to continue that work.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so really getting support for USAID projects and people, specifically projects that are in the climate sphere, that are not going to be taken up by another US agency or maybe even another donor.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, right now, US government is not focusing at all on a lot of things related to climate resiliency.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I think we've got to look for other sources of capital to fund those initiatives.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so that's what I'm trying to do.
[SPEAKER_02]: So stay tuned.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'll see if that comes a fruition.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I think a lot of other foundations are stepping up.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've seen just in the past few days or windows for consultants, talent pools that are opening up, especially for people on the ground, which would be great for USA Local staff.
[SPEAKER_02]: Just be creative.
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, at this panel yesterday, I basically ended by saying if we can generate and garner support for capital and fundraising to get through COVID,
[SPEAKER_02]: to help companies, whether this storm of COVID, we can get through this.
[SPEAKER_02]: Whether it's DEI or climate, whatever it is that's under attack, we need to rally together.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you have resources, skills, talents, whatever it is, put it to good use, be creative, talk about these things, because that's the only way that anything is going to change.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, Christina, thanks again for just taking the time to come on the podcast.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a real pleasure having you.
[SPEAKER_03]: We definitely need a follow-up episode.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I can tell you this conversation.
[SPEAKER_03]: Again, thank you for your time.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for the opportunity.
[SPEAKER_03]: Look forward to speaking with you soon.
[SPEAKER_02]: Sounds great.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thanks Sean.
[SPEAKER_02]: Take care.
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