Washington, DC
ADMINISTRATOR POWER: Thank you, Michael [Schiffer], for that introduction. Welcome everyone, both on screen and here in the room with us today, as we swear in Kerry Pelzman as the new Mission Director for USAID Cambodia.
I specifically want to thank a few people with us today. An enthusiastic virtual welcome to the U.S. Ambassador to Cambodia, W. Patrick Murphy. I’m sure that as fellow Peace Corps alumni, you and Kerry will become fast friends.
We are also welcoming a few USAID alumni back with us today. A huge welcome to Former Acting Administrator of USAID, Gloria Steele, joining us virtually, to our former Bureau for Global Health DAA Irene Koek, and to no less than four of our former Counselors: Carol Peasley, Susan Reichle, Chris Milligan, and Ken Yamashita. Thank you for returning to celebrate one of USAID’s great talents, Kerry Pelzman.
And our biggest, warmest welcome goes to our guests of honor today, who I’ve just had the pleasure of meeting: Kerry’s wonderful family. We are joined online today by her sister Robin, and her brother Fred, and here in person by her sister Jennifer and her family, and of course by Kerry’s husband Patrick. Patrick is another standout former colleague of ours at USAID. He retired last year after serving alongside Kerry in Missions across the world, from Russia to Iraq, India to South Africa.
I want to thank every one of you – because at USAID, our work relies on family support. And I’m told that Kerry is quite the correspondent, known in the pre-cell-phone era for writing twenty-page letters home with detailed updates of life in the field.
For Kerry, family has always come first, no matter how many reams of paper it took to keep in touch.
A fifth-generation Washingtonian, Kerry has called DC home all her life. Her grandfather actually owned Fred Pelzman’s Fashion Shop at 13th and F. I know he’d be so proud of you today, Kerry, as you are sworn in just blocks away from where that store stood.
I also want to acknowledge a few others who I’m told would also have loved to be here today: her late parents, Fred and Frankie Pelzman, whose commitment to service inspired Kerry’s own career.
Kerry’s father modeled service throughout his life. Whether he was organizing the opening ceremonies of Dulles Airport, advocating for more accessible facilities for persons with disabilities, or overseeing garden expansion around the city with such fervor that he was recognized by Lady Bird Johnson – he always gave back. And Frankie, Kerry’s mother, was a writer and poet, instilling in Kerry a love of all things artistic and antique, as well as an enduring love of books, and of family. Actually, as I was meeting with Kerry before this, she gave me a book of her mother’s poems, with a portrait of her mother on the cover, painted by her dad.
As a child, Kerry was inquisitive and confident. Her siblings shared how, when she was 7 or 8, Kerry would purposefully get lost, so that she would have to be found. The siblings, of course, thought it was because Kerry wanted attention. But now, it seems that maybe she always wanted to go off and explore.
Kerry’s parents recognized her leadership capacity early on, and nurtured it. There’s a picture of Kerry walking confidently out of a classroom, probably around eighth grade. Kerry’s dad gave it to her with a caption hand-written on it: Memo: CEO Kerry Pelzman emerges from Board Meeting. She’s wondering, “who’s sharing this information, who’s the mole?”
Kerry’s foray into service began when she became a reproductive health counselor during her years at Yale University – which inspired her to go serve as a Community Health Educator in the Peace Corps in Mauritania. She became dedicated to promoting health around the world and getting more people access to lifesaving care.
When she returned from Mauritania, Kerry received her Masters’ degree in Public Health from the University of Michigan. She traveled then to Togo on a Population Fellowship with CARE International, and then, in 1998, joined USAID.
The rest, as they say, is history.
USAID brought Kerry around the world, where she collected skills and accomplishments as readily as she collected art and antiques. USAID brought her to Russia and Kazakhstan; India and Afghanistan; Iraq and South Africa.
At her first post in Russia, Kerry was Head of the Health Office. There, she helped transform the child welfare system, shifting the standard procedure when a child was at risk – from removing children from families and placing them in institutions, to actually getting families the support they needed to properly care for their children themselves.
Kerry was also on the front lines of the US’s historic effort to turn the tides against HIV through PEPFAR, the largest commitment by any nation to address a disease in human history.
Kerry helped bring PEPFAR to the Central Asia region during the early 2000s, when an estimated 1.4 million people in the region were living with HIV – that was a nine-fold increase in less than a decade. Kerry disbursed the Central Asia region’s first PEPFAR funding, helping thousands of HIV- and AIDS-positive people find health and hope during a very scary time.
That experience turned her into, as one of her colleagues called her, “a black belt in PEPFAR” – and she took that experience, as any black belt would, to South Africa, where she administered the largest HIV-AIDS program in the region hardest hit by the disease, sub-Saharan Africa. PEPFAR has saved millions of lives throughout its history – and that doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because of leaders like Kerry.
And Kerry has not only led public health programs; she led education, democracy, and governance initiatives around the world – even in war zones.
In Iraq in 2007, as hopes for stability and democracy in Iraq were looking more and more grim, and military leaders were preparing for another surge of troops, Kerry worked to administer the second phase of the $300 million Tatweer Project, which worked with the government to train Iraqi civil servants in administration and governance. And I do feel it is projects like that, whose legacy one doesn’t feel, of course, in the moment, but one sees today when governments and administrative procedures and institutions are so much stronger than they have been.
In Afghanistan, as NATO handed over control to the Afghan government in 2013, Kerry led the Office of Social Sector Development, managing USAID’s health and education assistance, which provided everything from textbooks for schools to public health support for half of Afghanistan’s population.
Along the way, Kerry met her husband, Patrick, who traveled and worked with USAID in brilliant ways. They hosted family and friends, once packing her nephew and almost eighty of his choir members, their chaperones, and their teachers into the backyard that they shared in Pretoria. She continued collecting, gathering South African tiffins, Afghan rugs, and ancient abacuses. That’s a collection I would love to see.
And she committed time to mentoring and empowering all of her staff. Long before this Agency was focused on getting foreign service nationals the leadership opportunities they deserve, one of Kerry’s proudest accomplishments was securing two FSN-13 positions, the highest level of employment for non-US citizens at USAID, for the Mission in India after two years of lobbying. And that’s what it takes.
This I really love. Former FSN colleagues shared how Kerry referred to them as “Regional HIV Advisor” and “Regional Tuberculosis Advisor” in meetings with stakeholders – using titles that reflected their actual contributions before the Agency was doing so officially. Kerry has always worked to demonstrate how essential her colleagues’ work is to our mission—and to give them opportunities to contribute even more.
In 2018, Kerry returned to Washington, bringing her skills and experiences back home. Described by one of her best friends as “someone who can parse politics,” she served as the Deputy Assistant Administrator for Global Health during a difficult time for that portfolio. And then, in the middle of her tenure, COVID-19 hit. As COVID-19 claimed millions of lives, Kerry helped get lifesaving COVID-19 treatment and vaccines to communities around the world – and, critically, to keep USAID’s other health programs running as health systems were being battered and pushed to their brink. A once-in-a-century pandemic was still not too much of a challenge for Kerry.
And it shows just how ready she is to take on any challenge she’ll encounter in Cambodia.
I was just in the region a couple weeks ago during a trip to Vietnam. Such a stunning and dynamic part of the world, with such enormous promise – but of course real challenges as well.
After years of conflict, Cambodia is entering its fourth decade free from war. USAID reopened its Mission in Phnom Penh in 1992. In the years since, we’ve made progress in public health. Substantial progress, as Ambassador Murphy spoke to. Cambodia will, in fact, thanks to Kerry for carrying the torch, eliminate malaria by 2025. And recently, management of the Health Equity Fund, which was managed by USAID and provides healthcare for 2.5 million Cambodians, was transferred from USAID to the country itself. And that is one of the greatest measures of USAID success.
We’ve made progress – but we know, never enough – in combating climate change. In Cambodia, stretches of the Mekong River are recovering from pollution and overuse. And now, we are investing over $17 million in the agriculture sector, creating over 1,600 jobs and working to make food systems more resilient to climate change. A challenge, of course, across the world.
And we’ve made progress, again, as Ambassador Murphy spoke to, in the area of economic growth. In the two decades between 1998 and 2019, Cambodia was one of the fastest-growing economies in the world—and now, it is on track to achieve upper middle-income status by 2030.
Yet Cambodia struggles from significant challenges, too, that threaten to slow down, or even reverse, this progress.
For the past twenty years, Freedom House has rated Cambodia “not free,” and recently, civil liberties have declined even further. With the longest serving Prime Minister in the world, Cambodia functions in many ways as a one-party state. And with elections upcoming in July, tensions are rising as the government cracks down, consolidating power. Last month, as Michael spoke to, the government shuttered one of the country’s last independent media outlets. And in just a matter of weeks ago, the courts sentenced political opposition leader Kem Sokha to a 27-year prison sentence.
To take on these challenges and to serve the people of Cambodia, the Mission needs someone creative and determined. Someone experienced in making progress in really difficult environments. Someone who uplifts local communities and prioritizes their needs. Someone who is a public servant to their very core.
Someone like Kerry.
Kerry’s brother, Fred, tells a story. Fred is a doctor – he actually couldn’t be here in person today because he’s taking care of his patients. But Fred remembers a time, once, where he heard his father boasting to a friend about how his son was saving lives as a doctor—and then briefly mentioning that his daughter was in the foreign service. Fred remembers pulling his father aside and saying: “Dad, I take care of thousands of people. But Kerry, Kerry has taken care of millions.”
We see you, Fred. That kind of impact is exactly what Cambodia and its communities need right now. There is no better person to lead our work there, at such an important time for the country and for its people, than Kerry Pelzman.