We did go to a hair salon together in

Malawi.

And I'm not just bitter about hair when I say this, just to be clear, but the point is there's only so much hair.

So if you add a hair salon or a barber to a community, you're not creating more haircuts in the community.

You're just spreading it around.

And so if you help the one, the ones you help might look much better than the people you don't help because they start a business.

But they're stealing the business from a lot of other hair salons that we don't ever get to measure in that way.

We've seen that the

I was wondering if you could tell us kind of what the setup of those looks like, uh, and what they do day to day.

Sure.

So for what it's worth, this was, this was the biggest word on my 2025 bingo card, [chuckles] um, that, that I would've lost miserably on if I, if we actually played 2025 bingo.

And the, the reason for it is fairly simple in the backdrop, which is to recognize that USAID was the largest bilateral in the world, fifty billion dollars a year or so in, in aid around the world.

And yet USAID was tiny if you compare the budget of USAID in any given country to the budget of that country.

And, and then this is even more so if you think about foreign aid from other, other entities, from a philanthropist or even just from another bilateral that's not as large.

It's even true with the World Bank, which is obviously bigger than USAID, but still, still smaller than, than the budgets of local government.

I was wondering if you could run through those kind of quickly.

I was wondering if you could tell us kind of what the setup of those looks like, uh, and what they do day to day.

Sure.

So for what it's worth, this was, this was the biggest word on my twenty twenty-five bingo card, [chuckles] um, that, that I would've lost miserably on if I, if we actually played twenty twenty-five bingo.

And the, the reason for it is fairly simple in the backdrop, which is to recognize that USAID was the largest bilateral in the world, fifty billion dollars a year or so in, in aid around the world.

And yet USAID was tiny if you compare the budget of USAID in any given country to the budget of that country.

And, and then this is even more so if you think about foreign aid from other, other entities, from a philanthropist or even just from another bilateral that's not as large.

It's even true with the World Bank, which is obviously bigger than USAID, but still, still smaller than, than the budgets of local government.

I was wondering if you could run through those kind of quickly.

So getting concrete, when someone's going to sign their name to that money being moved, how did you change the process? What did they then have to do or how did the evidence get brought in?

So we were still in the middle of making changes, to be clear.

We definitely had some plans for longer run in terms of what we wanted to see.

And based on the fact that we had to build our team and we started off with one person in the office and by the time things fell apart, we were around the low 30s in terms of number of people in our office.

So it's a bit of a slope, right? I can describe where we wanted to be, where we got.

In terms of the types of changes that we were able to make, USAID at the end of the day is a very decentralized organization.

And the way the money flowed basically was Congress, in theory, I have to add that now, has the power of the purse.

How did you think about that aspect of it? So,