SECRETARY BLINKEN: Thank you.
Hey, just – Erv, thank you so much.
Thank you for your leadership every day in the African Affairs Bureau.
And I’m also joined by our Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy, Liz Allen.
And look, it’s pretty simple.
We just had this wonderful trip, and I didn’t want it to end, so we found a way to sort
of continue it – (laughter) – today.
And I’m really grateful to each and every one of you for coming out.
Erv, by the way, who doesn’t look it unless you consider that we had a grade school program
has actually been in this line of work for 27 years.
So —
(Applause.)
So as Erv said, we did just get back from the trip.
Actually, truth be told, we started on another continent.
We started in Cambodia, we went to the Philippines, and then we transitioned to South Africa,
to the DRC, to Rwanda.
We made a couple of pit stops, too, on the way home, a quick pit stop in Ghana to refuel,
but managed to see the president in the waiting room at the airport.
Very good.
Even hit Cabo Verde; it was our very last stop.
And then finally, finally back home.
But this is an ongoing story, which is really why I wanted to have the chance to be here
with all of you today.
The trip, my second to Sub-Saharan Africa – and in a sense the third, because the
very – I think the second trip that I did as Secretary was actually a virtual trip to
Kenya and Nigeria very early on when we weren’t actually traveling.
So we’ve had extensive engagement, and I’ll come to it again later.
We’re going to have an African Leaders Summit that President Biden’s hosting at the end
of the year.
So there’s a lot of work leading and ramping up to that.
But I think, as Erv suggested, this is evidence that for us, Sub-Saharan Africa is a major
force for the future.
And it’s the very numbers that Erv cited that go to the heart of this, the fact that,
as he said, in the next couple of years virtually half the population will be under the age
of 25, and by 2050, one in four people on this planet from Africa.
That is the definition of the future, and we have a profound stake in trying to get
that shared future right.
One of the opportunities that I had during the trip was to lay out our Strategy for Sub-Saharan
Africa, and we tried to focus on a simple proposition.
For us now, this is not about what we do for Africa; it’s what we do with Africa.
And it comes down to a – I think a simple, powerful recognition.
There is not a single issue that is really having an effect on the lives of our people
and on Africans – whether it is COVID that we’ve all been grappling with and global
health more broadly, whether it’s climate change, whether it’s the impact of emerging
technologies on all of our lives – not a single one of these issues can we effectively
address alone.
We have to find ways to cooperate, find ways to coordinate.
We have to find ways to do more with other countries.
And precisely because Africa represents so much of the future as well as the present,
it’s in our interest to find ways to deepen our cooperation.
The partnership that we’re looking for extends well beyond government.
It goes to civil society and NGOs; it goes to the private sector; it goes to citizens
more broadly.
And we had an opportunity on the trip to connect across these many different groups, and that’s
part of the reason I was so anxious to in effect extend the trip by talking to all of
you.
And in effect, these partnerships are actually going to be driven by whether you wind up
or are in government, whether you’re in civil society, whether you’re in business,
whether you’re in academia, whatever the case may be – the arts – you’re at the
heart of the kind of partnerships that we hope to build.
In particular, we have here, as Erv said, folks from the diaspora and the Mandela Fellowship,
something I’m very excited about.
You are, as a result, already in fact building the partnerships that we’re trying to build.
Let me just say a couple of quick words about the extraordinary power of the fellowship
program.
Since President Obama launched the fellowship program, over 5,800 rising leaders from Sub-Saharan
Africa have actually taken part.
That’s remarkable in just a few short years.
But what’s even more remarkable – because I’ve had a chance to talk to a number of
you over the years, including most recently on this trip – is that I think the Mandela
Fellowship does a couple of very powerful things.
One is that it actually allows you to create networks that will endure long after your
fellowship and, I think, are going to power change far into the future.
I met some alums in South Africa just this past trip.
Fellows are tackling issues like getting more girls into STEM, just to cite one example.
But what is fundamental to the fellowship is that it goes both ways.
Ideas, innovations are flowing in both directions.
That’s true of the fellows who are here among you today.
You actually manage to enrich our college campuses, universities, even as you study
there.
So American students who are there got as much, if not more out of this, I would say,
than you did.
And it’s also true of members of the diaspora who are with us today.
You’re doing work that bridges our countries, our cultures, our communities, the arts, public
health, education, human rights, democracy – all of that is what you’re doing.
The last thing I wanted to share is this, because I’m mostly anxious to hear from
you and have a conversation.
One of the things that I hear some of the time when I’m meeting with young people
is: how can the U.S. talk about the importance of democracy – which is one of the things
we talked in the strategy – when you face your own challenges here at home in the United
States when it comes to democracy, challenges that I think are visible every day?
And actually, that’s part of the answer.
The very fact that they are visible, that you see us grappling with them every single
day, that it’s not pushed under the carpet, it’s not pretended that these problems don’t
exist, we’re actually confronting them openly, transparently – that is actually part of
the answer.
Because as long as you can do that, I think you’ll come out on the right side of things.
But the main point for our strategy is this: It doesn’t treat democracy as an issue where
Africa has problems and the United States has solutions.
On the contrary, it recognizes that we all have challenges in strengthening our democracies,
making sure they’re resilient, and it’s everything from misinformation to inequity.
And we have a real stake in learning from each other.
One of the things that I found over almost 30 years of being engaged in foreign policy
and so getting to travel the world in one way or another – first with President Clinton,
and then with President Obama, and now with President Biden – is on just about everything
that we’re trying to figure out, someone somewhere probably has.
And if we can just find ways to share that information so we don’t have to keep reinventing
the wheel, we’re going to make progress a lot faster than what people can imagine.
We need to draw on the best ideas, we need to draw on the best innovations no matter
where they’re from.
And that is the spirit of the Summit for Democracy that we initiated last year – President
Biden did – and it’s the spirit that will animate the Africa Leaders Summit at the end
of the year.
And that summit is going to have a big role for young people, rising generations, and
a big role for the diaspora.
So stay tuned.
A lot more to come in the next few months.
The last point is this.
This trip, again, underscored for me that so many issues that we now consider global
priorities and that we’ve talked about – including, for example, the interconnectedness of our
health and our climate – are actually championed first in Africa by African citizens and nations.
In South Africa and beyond, we heard how our respective civil rights movements had inspired
and energized each other over the generations, and we still find that today.
So let me end with this: two requests.
First, the 2023 Mandela Washington Fellowship application opens tomorrow.
So help us recruit.
If you had a good experience, if this is something that’s been beneficial to you, spread the
word.
Share it.
We want to get the best of the rising generation to take part.
Second, from day one I have made it a priority to try to recruit and retain a workforce at
the State Department that actually reflects the country that we represent.
So if any of you Americans here are interested in a career in foreign policy, the Foreign
Service, the Civil Service, come on down.
We need you; we want you.
This is a time – it’s the most exciting time, as challenging as it is to be engaged
in diplomacy, because of the very reason that I cited at the outset.
None of the problems that really matter can be tackled by any one country acting alone.
The role of our diplomacy, the role of our diplomats, is to build that cooperation, that
coordination among countries.
There’s never been a more important time to do it, so come on down.
Let me stop talking with that, because I’m really anxious to hear (inaudible).
(Applause.)