The taxpayer-funded African Development Foundation was full of corruption, but when the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency investigated it, the press took its side. The Daily Wire reports:
When the Department of Government Efficiency showed up at a small USAID-linked federal agency called the African Development Foundation in March, its management locked the doors and refused to let auditors in. Its board sued to stop DOGE, and was lauded by the Left for objecting to granting “access to USADF systems including financial records….” But … those records amounted to a crime scene.
The African Development Foundation’s employees have been sounding the alarm for years about self-dealing, cruelty, and anti-white discrimination. Money sent to Africa was then wired to the personal bank accounts of bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. An official promoted his for-profit, multi-level marketing scheme to poor Africans. Law enforcement identified possible criminal kickbacks…“they were actually covering up horrible things,” one former employee said….
A federal statute says the ADF can only make grants to groups in Africa. But to siphon off that money to its officials and their cronies, it required African groups to send what were essentially kickbacks to the United States, to ADF staff and their friends.
When DOGE gained access to the ADF’s headquarters with the help of U.S. Marshals, the ADF was led by Travis Adkins, a former Biden political appointee at USAID. Adkins, ADF’s CEO since 2021, diverted money from grants to the pockets of ADF staff. An assistant to Adkins said that when she asked why her paycheck was lower than agreed upon, Adkins told her that the rest of her paycheck would be coming from an account in Africa.
He “sent me an email connecting me with this guy in Africa who asked for my banking information. Within a few days, this guy wired me $17,000,” she revealed. Bank records viewed by the Daily Wire traced the transfer to an account in Kenya.
Another longtime staffer was “put on the payroll of an African partner and was informed she was being paid through an entity in Mauritania,” a vast, arid country in northwest Africa. “No payroll, state, or federal taxes were withheld from her paychecks.”
“The contracts don’t make sense, and [ADF knows investigators] will find lots of wrongdoing and illegal activity,” the assistant to Adkins added. “They have been operating like this for years, and no one did anything about it.”
The ADF awarded a grant to an organization of Kenyan journalists, Africa 24, and told it, in return, to pay the salaries of ADF staff.
ADF’s CFO Mathieu Zahui admitted and tried to justify this outrageous shenanigan. “The grant was provided to an African organization…a grant can pay for people,” he told The Daily Wire. “Yeah, granted, they were in D.C.”
These arrangements were not entirely new, and some dated back to the Obama administration. The ADF’s prior head, C.D. Glin — a former Peace Corps affirmative-action officer and Obama political appointee — “reverse-engineered African grants to steer money to friends in the United States,” according to ADF staff.
The ADF made grants to the Association of Ghana Industries on the condition that it send money to Pyxera Global, a D.C. outfit where Glin previously worked as a director, to “do a study of the artisan sector in Ghana,” ADF program manager Kate Ristroph told investigators. “We’re in that murky territory of like, is this legal?” she added. “The CEO specifically directed it.” The Daily Wire adds that
Glin attempted to foist grants addressing nonexistent problems on African groups as a way to steer money to an affiliate of the Aspen Institute, the left-wing Colorado nonprofit, Ristroph said. The then-head of that affiliate, called Artisan Alliance, “flat out tells us she’s a close personal friend of C.D. Glin,” she said.
The agency offered a grant to the Heva Fund, an African group, on the condition that it send a portion to Artisan Alliance. The grant was ostensibly to produce personal protective equipment like face masks, even though Heva told the agency there was no demand for such a thing because affordable PPE was readily available in the region.
Heva was so uncomfortable with the proposition that it asked to cancel the grant, Ristroph said. So the agency pushed the plan on a Kenyan group called Ustadi, which also balked, saying “We don’t need to pay Artisan Alliance, an American company, to help Kenyans learn how to sell masks,” she said.
Western economists have long told Africans to avoid corruption by only awarding contracts through competitive bidding. Yet, ADF was ordering Africans to do the opposite, requiring them to give contracts and money to ADF cronies.
