Washington, DC
ADMINISTRATOR SAMANTHA POWER: Thank you so much, Mileydi [Guilarte], and thank you for your leadership and your steady hand in our LAC [Latin America and the Caribbean] bureau.
Let me just encourage anyone who has their camera off and feels comfortable, to put it on, just so Ken can feel even more of the love. One of the things we’re so thrilled to see here is the team in Honduras. You’re very small, each of you, but I recognize even from afar – there you are! – some of the folks I got to meet on my trip to Honduras. You all are doing an incredible job. We’re really, really lucky to have you on the team, leading the team, and here with us today. And I know Ken is really grateful. And I hope you’re pleased that you saw your Deputy Mission Director become your Acting Mission Director become your Mission Director – which is about to happen. That doesn’t always happen, but it means that obviously Ken brings a huge amount of knowledge to this Mission Director role.
Ambassador [Laura] Dogu, thank you for recognizing that this is a really special day in the life of Ken, in the life of anybody moving into a Mission Director role. We try to take our swearing-ins here as seriously as you do over at the State Department. But thank you, in your words and in your actions, for really appreciating USAID’s role as a really important ground game for the United States – and for stressing rightly that there are the effects of migration, which we see at our southern border and the challenges they’re in. And then there are the human effects in the communities that, as you put it, are hollowed out when some of the most dynamic and talented people feel that they have no choice but to leave, because the economic opportunities aren’t there, or because violence and other threats purveyed. So anything we can do to advance human development itself, bridges that nexus between foreign and domestic policy for Honduras and frankly for the United States.
Ambassador [Javier] Bú, thank you for being here on behalf of your government, it means a lot to us. This is a partnership that we really want to strengthen. We really appreciate you saying that in your hour of need that USAID has been there. We are there, I think, for the long haul, and some of the investments we make aren’t ones that are going to show immediate dividends. But if we keep our eye on our ultimate objectives, I think together we can get an awful lot done. And we have the right person heading into the role of Mission Director, as I think he’s proven already in his time on the ground.
Special welcome to Ken’s family. I had the chance to meet his mom, Shirley, and her husband John – great to have you both with us, really good of you to be here in person. I got to meet Diya and Aide – and Kieran is on the screen. Three of Ken’s four kids are here in some fashion. We’re also thrilled to have Ken’s father Earl, and his sister Donna; his brothers Dave and John, John’s wife Ruth, and Dave’s spouse Baharan, who are also joining virtually.
Ken grew up in Ashland, Massachusetts, an industrial town less than 30 miles from Boston but, I gather, worlds away from the big city – as it had just a population of 8,000 when Ken was growing up.
As a kid, Mom will attest, Ken was always exploring. In middle school, he and his childhood friend James Macneil would spend hours in the protected forest near their homes – hiking, climbing, searching for amphibians of all kinds. They navigated the spiky brambles and found caves, naming parts of the forest after their discoveries. “Ken always liked to go into the wild,” James remembered, “and discover places that were unexplored.”
That was a preview, I guess, of the career that he would build – and that taste of adventure and discovery that every new posting, every new trip, unlocks. After a successful seven-year career in tech consulting, international work began to call. He began a Masters in Foreign Service at Georgetown, where he read Graham Hancock’s book The Lords of Poverty, which argues – with some debate generated – that international aid is often siphoned off by local elites or American companies who are looking to make a profit. Ken emerged from his Master’s academic experience determined to support community leaders and invest in local solutions, bringing a focus to grassroots development in what would become 17 years with Catholic Relief Services and Mercy Corps.
In the early 2000s, for example, when the Bhuj earthquake devastated rural communities in Gujarat, India, Ken helped develop what would become one of Catholic Relief’s biggest reconstruction programs in the entire world. Instead of hiring an international contractor to come in and rebuild, as was normal in development work at the time – and not abnormal today – Ken did something very different. He and his team hired Gujarati laborers who knew how to use enriched earthen blocks to repair damaged homes, using materials and skills native to Gujarat to rebuild. His team helped train more local masons to produce bricks, as well – setting up a massive brick production facility that produced close to five million bricks, and that helped rebuild more than 2,600 homes.
Ken brought the same emphasis on local leadership to USAID, through postings in Iraq, Yemen, Nicaragua, Guatemala, right here in Washington, and of course, in Honduras most recently.
In Guatemala, for example, Ken spearheaded one of the Mission’s first local partnerships – a partnership with a local Guatemalan NGO called El Refugio. This is an NGO that works with victims of trafficking and gender-based violence. Under Ken’s leadership, the Mission helped standardize El Refugio’s contracting and financial management procedures so they could qualify for significant USAID assistance.
And that partnership doesn’t just still exist today – it has grown into one of USAID’s key localization success stories. When I visited Guatemala in 2021, shortly after I started as USAID Administrator, I had the opportunity to visit a shelter run by this organization. I saw how women could receive reproductive care, treatment for substance abuse, and HIV/AIDS resources in a safe and structured environment. I saw how easier access to legal support for survivors was helping convict traffickers across the country. I saw how counselors and child protection officers affiliated with this organization were helping the Guatemalan government reunite families. Today, El Refugio is regarded as the gold standard for survivor-centered care in Guatemala – and we at USAID are honored to continue supporting them.
Ken has also invested heavily in his staff – especially his local staff. Under Ken’s mentorship, foreign service nationals have been elevated to team lead positions and sent on coveted fellowships and TDYs. Ken himself has created several senior FSN positions in the various Mission Front Offices, including two in Honduras. He was just updating me on the route to get an FSN-13 position established there at the Mission. And he has appointed FSNs to high-profile positions advising Mission Directors and even U.S. Ambassadors on politically sensitive topics like migration, anti-corruption, and justice work. He is about lifting up his team members and empowering them.
And his true love for development and service is infectious. One of his colleagues in Honduras remembers how he’d pop into her office and ask her, “Don’t you just love what we do? Don’t you just love what we get to do? Our jobs are so amazing.” She remembers, “Look, we had good days and bad days, but it’s rare that you find someone who is 100 percent all in, and just loves his work. Ken is that someone.”
I’m grateful that Ken will be bringing that enthusiasm, expertise, and experience in Latin America to this, his newest role: Mission Director of USAID/Honduras.
This formal swearing-in comes at an important time for the Mission and the Embassy – a time when the Biden-Harris Administration is working to invest in the prosperity of the Honduran people, to more directly address the challenges driving Hondurans from their homes, and to expand access to legal migration into the United States.
That’s why one of my first meetings after taking this job was in fact with Honduran civil society organizations, to learn exactly how we could support their work to help promote good governance and human rights on the local and the national scale. It’s why we are providing courses in applied math, reading, and information analysis to tens of thousands of young people, while also expanding access to skills training and financial management programs so that they can be prepared for employment. And it’s why we are working on expanding access to H2 temporary visas for Hondurans – to provide safe, legal pathways for migrants, and having the added benefit of addressing a shortage of agricultural workers here in the United States. We’ve made huge progress on H2B. We have to make huge progress on H2A together. And I really believe that we can do that, and we are very determined to partner with the Honduran government to grow that program.
There is no doubt that Ken is the perfect person to lead these effort – because he’s already played a key role in making our work in Honduras more effective. Though the restoration of funding in 2021 came as a relief to the Mission, it also was overwhelming to a team that wasn’t staffed enough to properly manage that infusion of programming resources. So, as Deputy Mission Director and later as Acting Mission Director, Ken focused on ramping up hiring and building a strong management team, increasing staff positions from 104 to 151 in a single year. If you know how hiring works at USAID, you’ll understand that is a monumental achievement – 104 to 151.
In the process, he maintained his commitment to staff empowerment and localization. He didn’t hesitate to put foreign service nationals in charge of high-profile migration and democratic governance portfolios. In a first for the Mission, as federal funding began to flow once again, he increased the amount invested in local organizations from what had been $30 million over seven years to $50 million over two years – bringing it to approximately 18 percent of the Mission’s total assistance. And he was just telling me that more was ahead, and it’s possible that those numbers will go up even more as again, we make sure that these local organizations have adequate capacity to be able to partner effectively with USAID. And he worked to expand the Mission’s impact, as well, creating the Mission’s first-ever portfolio focused on environmental conservation and climate change – maybe influenced by his daughter, who works in that field.
I got to see the fruits of Ken’s labor on my visit to Honduras. Guided by Ken himself, I got to see firsthand how USAID was assisting in essential efforts to expand education, to build economic opportunity, and to reduce crime and corruption. I spoke with a pastor in San Pedro Sula working to reduce gang violence and expand economic opportunity for young people from the city’s most marginalized communities. I met with a woman who lost everything during the floods of Hurricanes Eta and Iota, who rode out the storm with her children at a gas station – basically on the roof of a gas station – and whose home was rebuilt with USAID’s support.
Ken’s leadership will continue to be critically important to advancing the Agency’s efforts to be effective partners to the Honduran people. And this ceremony is in many ways a long-overdue acknowledgment of the ways in which Ken has already contributed to the future of our partnership, and advancing the cause of human dignity for the Honduran people. I’m completely confident that he will continue to do a fantastic job as our official Mission Director, and I am grateful to have him representing the Agency, and the United States, in Tegucigalpa.
And now, it’s my great pleasure at long last to make it official, and to swear in Ken Maclean as our newest Mission Director in Honduras.