Inside USAID: An Odyssey of Foreign Assistance

USAID is well known, and now sorely missed, for its humanitarian, public health and disaster response work -- but it did far more, including creating entire industries employing thousands of otherwise would-be migrants to the US, training former Soviet bureaucrats, lawyers and entrepreneurs in Western accounting and commercial law systems, teaching court administrators, judges and attorneys in Latin America to conduct modern jury trials, electrifying villages in remote parts of Guatemala, improving anti-corruption tools and ethics rules in host governments, training entire communities to promote eco-tourism and protect their forests, creating systems to prevent poaching in African game parks, improving teaching methods in rural Peruvian schools, promoting the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, and thousands of other activities spanning the entire range of human activity. The programs were consistently approved by the US Congress, White House OMB, and the State Department and were continually examined and evaluated by both internal and external auditors.

Why would a partner in a Beverly Hills law firm give up a successful career to work in foreign aid for the next 27 years only to see his agency fed "into the woodchipper?" Was USAID really a corrupt organization? Or was it, instead, the primary tool the US government used to accomplish virtually anything overseas that did not merit a military or purely diplomatic response? What was it like to raise an American family overseas while working in international development? This book will answer those questions.

Clifford Brown last served as USAID Mission Director to Guinea and Sierra Leone, as the USAID Representative to Kyrgyzstan, as Deputy Mission Director in Colombia, and as Democracy Office Chief in Nicaragua. Prior to that, he was a regional legal advisor in Africa and Central America, with a birds-eye view of the thorniest management issues that arose in a host of missions. The book, often critical, is a mix of policy commentary, travelogue, and humorous memoir of his life and the dangers he lived through in eight different countries from 1987 through 2016.