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Editor’s Note: This is part two in a series of investigative reports on
the African Development Foundation, which gained notoriety for resisting
a review by the Department of Government Efficiency. You can read part
one here.

—

When Department of Government Efficiency aides 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 them in. A
fired board member sued to stop DOGE, and the group was lauded for
resisting DOGE’s demands for “access to USADF systems including
financial records, payment and human resources systems.”

But the objection, several former employees told The Daily Wire, might
not have been on principled grounds, but rather because those records
amounted to a crime scene.

The African Development Foundation has an annual budget of just $45
million. But, operating out of sight and out of mind, it might have been
the most corrupt agency in Washington, a Daily Wire investigation found.
Its employees have been sounding the alarm for years about a culture of self-dealing, abuse, and anti-white discrimination, while those who now
object to DOGE’s shuttering of the agency did nothing to help fix it.

By law, the agency is only allowed to give grants to Africa-based
groups. But it moved money through African entities and then back to the
United States to pad salaries of D.C. bureaucrats and pay their friends
and former employers, employees said.

Until the DOGE takeover, which culminated in U.S. Marshals ordering
building security to let Trump administration officials in, the agency
was led by CEO Travis Adkins, who arrived in 2021 after a short stint as
a Biden appointee at USAID. An assistant to Adkins said after she asked
why her paycheck was lower than agreed upon, Adkins informed her that
the remainder would be coming from an overseas account.

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 told The Daily Wire on condition of anonymity. The Daily Wire
reviewed bank paperwork showing the transfer from an account in Kenya.

Another longtime employee, she said, was eventually “put on the payroll
of an African partner and was informed she was being paid through an
entity in Mauritania. No payroll, state or federal taxes were withheld
from her paychecks.”

“The contracts don’t make sense and they know [DOGE] will find lots of wrongdoing and illegal activity,” she said. “I’m not a fan of DOGE, but some of the things they’re doing need to be done. They have been
operating like this for years and no one did anything about it.”


Video shows DOGE aides locked out of the African Development
Foundation’s office. / @BrettMmurphy

International money-laundering?
As the Trump administration dismantled USAID and contractors in D.C.’s affluent suburbs complained about the job losses it would cause, some speculated about whether international charity funding was being
laundered to politically-connected Washingtonians.

That is not dissimilar to what the African Development Foundation did regularly, according to The Daily Wire’s interviews with employees as
well as videotaped internal interviews that became part of a lawsuit.

In one instance, it awarded a grant to a Kenyan journalism group called
Africa 24 and directed that group to, in turn, pay the salaries of
Americans at the federal agency’s D.C. headquarters. That meant Congress thought it was a charitable grant to Africa, and that the agency had a
low overhead rate. In reality, the money was being spent on D.C.
bureaucrats.

Chief Financial Officer Mathieu Zahui acknowledged and defended the arrangement.

“The grant was provided to an African organization…A grant can pay for people,” he told The Daily Wire in an interview at his home, where he
has been spending his days after being locked out of the office. “Yeah, granted, they were in D.C.”

Part one of this series revealed that last year, the USAID inspector
general seized Zahui’s phone and found that he had received payments to
his personal bank account from the owner of a company to which he
steered contracts, but he has not been charged with a crime.

“We’re in that murky territory of like, is this legal?” a staffer said. “The CEO specifically directed it.” The agency hired many workers as contractors instead of official government employees, making it possible
to pay them using creative funding mechanisms. Once they were hired,
executives drew no distinction between contractors and government
employees, even having contractors supervise employees, possess
government credit cards, and make decisions about money in violation of
federal rules, the agency’s former general counsel, Mateo Dunne, told
The Daily Wire.

Its CEO from 2016 to 2021, C.D. Glin — a former Peace Corps DEI officer
and later an Obama political appointee to the Peace Corps — reverse-engineered African grants to steer money to friends in the
United States, employees said.

The agency gave grants to the Association of Ghana Industries on the
condition that the African group pay Pyxera Global, a D.C. organization
where Glin previously worked as director of business development, to “do
a study of the artisan sector in Ghana,” agency program manager Kate
Ristroph said in a videotaped internal investigative interview with
Dunne.

“We’re in that murky territory of like, is this legal?” she said. “The CEO specifically directed it.”

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, called Artisan Alliance,
Ristroph said. The head of Artisan Alliance at the time “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 personal protective equipment 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.

In another case, a grant to the African group CS Consulting was used to
pay the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a D.C. think
tank. “It’s all basically a pass through to CSIS,” Ristroph said.

She said the agency trains African grantees to avoid third-world style corruption by only giving out contracts that have been competitively bid
at arm’s length, yet she was forced to tell them that the Americans were ordering them to do the opposite.

“I was on the phone with them…saying we’re signing a new grant to [the Association of Ghana Industries], and there will be a component that is
a contract with Pyxera Global that is not competed. It’s already been decided,” she said. “It puts me in a compromising position.”

https://www.dailywire.com/news/african-aid-agency-used-foreign-pass-throu ghs-to-hide-money-that-went-to-d-c-staff-friends

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