Sonali Korde was sworn in last week as the new head of USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance. It comes after her predecessor Sarah Charles said she was “tired” as she stepped down from the role last year, with the bureau overseeing unprecedented amounts of funding and humanitarian response operations.
USAID Administrator Samantha Power briefly acknowledged the challenges during Korde’s swearing-in ceremony, describing the bureau as one that has been “overstretched for so long, that has really difficult human workforce challenges, by virtue of hiring mechanisms and by virtue of just the toll it takes to work on crisis after crisis.”
Korde has been at USAID for nearly two decades, most recently leading the U.S. efforts to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. But she’s human too and, like Charles, is not indefatigable. There was a point when she was working on the Ebola response when she felt she could not keep going, Power recounted. She took a night off to go to a party, only to be taken aside by an acquaintance and told: “Get your shit together, Sonali, do your duty to your country.” Apparently, she took these words to heart and revisits them every time she feels like quitting.