WASHINGTON, 18 November 2021, (TON): Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken has said that I’m very grateful to all of you for being able to join us this morning.

I really wanted to spend the next hour or so listening to each of you, so let me just be very brief at the top. This he said during conversation here in Kenya.

This is an important time, not just for Kenya but around the world. We’re seeing, we’ve seen over the last decade or so what some would call the democratic recession – democracies are falling back, as opposed to test democracy in all sorts of ways, from inside and from outside.

As we’ve seen citizens’ trust in democracy decrease, we’ve seen bad actors play up some (inaudible) that exist within democracies; independent institutions challenged and undermined; journalists, human rights activists threatened and attacked. Even vibrant democracies like Kenya are experiencing these pressures, especially around election time.

We’ve seen the same challenges here that we see in many parts of the world: misinformation, political violence, voter intimidation, voter bribery, (inaudible).

And these are stories that we see in place after place. And there’s also something that chips away at democracy in country after country, and that is corruption – there’s also bias and intimidation, (inaudible).