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This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
INSIDE DEVELOPMENT
In this section:
El Salvador Legislature Recognizes USAID Mission
As ‘Noble Friend’
Ecuador, Salvador NGOs Focus on Clean Government
GDA Director Holly Wise Retires After 25 Years
with the Agency
Cochran, Lewis New Heads of Appropriations Committees
New Funding Mechanism Facilitates Public-Private
Alliances
Program Evaluations Revisited With Eye To Reform
U.S. Leads Rise in Flow of Global Foreign Assistance
El Salvador Legislature Recognizes USAID Mission As ‘Noble
Friend’
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Ciro Cruz Zepeda, president of the El Salvador Legislative
Assembly, and Mark Silverman, USAID/El Salvador mission
director.
Elvira Salinas |
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador—After more than 25
years of work in El Salvador, the USAID mission was recognized
by the Salvadoran Legislative Assembly as Noble Amiga de El
Salvador—noble friend of the country.
USAID/El Salvador Mission Director Mark Silverman accepted
the plaque on behalf of the U.S. government.
In its special recognition, the legislative assembly noted:
“USAID has contributed greatly to the strengthening of
democracy in El Salvador, focusing its economic assistance
on strategic areas such as improving health and education,
mitigating rural poverty, providing access to potable water,
supporting reconstruction after natural disasters, reactivating
the economy, and protecting the environment. USAID collaborated
in the modernization programs of key government institutions
and, in a special way, the legislative assembly.”
The U.S. has spent $4 billion in El Salvador since 1979.
The bulk of aid was made available during the 1980s and
90s, as the country was coping with and recovering from a
long civil war. During the transition to peace, USAID helped
provide legal title to land for more than 36,000 Salvadorans—many
of them ex-combatants. The Agency helped farmers get back
on their feet, repaired rural electrical systems and roads,
and also helped the Salvadoran government put into place sound
economic policies. More recently, USAID supported the creation
of the public defender’s office, introduced an institutionalized
alternative dispute resolution, and helped to strengthen the
Legislative Assembly, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, the
National Council for the Judiciary, the Judicial School, and
the National Civilian Police.
The Agency also runs health and education programs, and
recently concluded a large reconstruction program following
Hurricane Mitch and two earthquakes.
The most recent earthquake recovery program provided land
titles to 29,000 poor families and completed reconstruction
of houses, water systems, and dozens of schools and municipal
buildings (see November 2004 FrontLines).
Ecuador, Salvador NGOs Focus on Clean Government
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Workshop participants meeting with Mario Conejo, mayor
of Otavalo, Ecuador.
Pierce McManus, USAID |
Latin American community leaders, NGO representatives, and
USAID democracy officers shared thoughts and ideas at two
workshops held simultaneously in Quito and San Salvador January
24–28.
Some 50 USAID democracy and governance (DG) officers from
missions across Latin and Central America attended, as well
as about three dozen local partners.
The workshops included presentations, group work, field
trips, academic reading requirements, and training in methodologies.
The discussions aimed at combining theory and practice in
the areas of anticorruption, decentralization, and democratic
local governance.
Participants learned innovative community approaches to
addressing crime from USAID/Colombia’s Safe Cities program.
They also analyzed real crime statistics and suggested their
own community response, which was compared to what the actual
community decided to do.
In El Salvador, participants heard from mayors and other
leaders about citizens’ involvement in increasing transparency
of local government decisionmaking and creating performance
indicators to monitor government operations.
Meanwhile, in Ecuador, attendees met with mayors on a field
trip to Cotocachi and Otavalo, where they discussed citizen
participation and oversight experiences. Attendees were also
able to meet with local partners and project implementers
at a reception hosted by USAID/Ecuador.
“Our intent was to deliver high-quality training aimed
at improving the quality of DG programs by exposure to the
latest academic thinking and programming from other regions,
as well as comparing similar approaches now being undertaken
in the LAC [Latin American and Caribbean] region,” said
Neil Levine, director of the DG Office’s Governance Division.
GDA Director Holly Wise Retires After 25 Years with the
Agency
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Holly Wise
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Holly Wise, who helped design and then became director of
USAID’s Global Development Alliance Secretariat, is retiring
after 25 years with the Agency.
Since it was formed in 2001, the GDA has helped create more
than 200 alliances—in which USAID has invested about
$500 million, and private partners have put in another $2
billion toward development projects. Leveraging private investor
money is a new concept to development, which has traditionally
been funded by aid and nonprofit organizations.
“It’s been a great challenge to be able to do
this because it’s been uncharted territory,” Wise
said, just weeks before her departure in March (ahead of her
official retirement date in May). “It’s been wonderful
to see it take hold.”
Wise has worked at USAID missions in Uganda, Kenya, Barbados,
China, and the Philippines. In Washington, before becoming
director of the GDA in 2002, Wise led USAID’s Office
of Business Development. She also held the USAID Chair at
the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, where she taught
political science and environmental courses.
In a 2004 interview in The Business of Government magazine,
Wise said: “There are many companies now that need to
understand new markets and view poor people not as a liability
but an opportunity. It makes these companies more agile and
competitive, and they will be ready to take up tomorrow’s
challenges. They’re willing to work in emerging markets
with others who can help them understand those markets better,
and help them do the right thing with delivering products
to, or sourcing goods and services from, the poor.”
The GDA’s work is now part of a case study at the John
F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, said
Wise, in listing some of the milestones for the GDA.
Wise herself was a finalist for the Service to America Medal,
which pays tribute to people in the federal workforce who
have made significant contributions to the country.
Wise, who is also a mother of three, plans to take a little
time off before deciding on her next career move.
Cochran, Lewis New Heads of Appropriations Committees
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Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss
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Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., and Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Calif.,
are the new chairmen of the committees on appropriations in
the 109th Congress in 2005, a year when increases for HIV/AIDS
programs and the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) will be
key budgeting issues for USAID.
Cochran is taking over the Senate chairmanship from Sen.
Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, who had reached the six-year term limit
in the post. Lewis, a 27-year veteran in the House, won that
body’s appropriations chairmanship after a hotly-contested,
three-way competition.
Cochran has served on several appropriations subcommittees
during his 26 years in the Senate, and has chaired two—agriculture
and homeland security.
During his first year on the agriculture subcommittee, he
started the Cochran Fellowship Program through the Agriculture
Department’s Office of International Cooperation and
Development. The fellowship, now 20 years old, exposes senior
and mid-level specialists from middle-income countries and
emerging markets to U.S. expertise, goods, and services. The
goal is to promote development in their own countries and
build ongoing relations in the United States.
“We created opportunities for foreign nationals to
visit the U.S. to explore techniques in agriculture, food
safety, and other areas that they could take back to their
own countries,” Cochran said.
Lewis was chairman of the defense appropriations subcommittee
and a long-time member of the Foreign Operations subcommittee.
He has said the United States should be a force in foreign
affairs.
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Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Calif
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“It’s my view that, beyond national defense, one
of our major responsibilities is to have a positive impact
upon the world and the opportunity for freedom for people
in the world,” Lewis said during a January meeting of
the Subcommittee on Foreign Operations that focused on the
Asian tsunami.
“This is a chance for us to have people look at America
in a different way in the [South Asian] region,” Lewis
said. “I’ve spent a considerable amount of my time—my
life in the past—in the country of India. And the very
areas in the south that were impacted by the tsunami are the
areas where I spent most of my time. It’s incredible
to understand what’s happened” throughout the region.
“In all those populations there is a chance for us
to change their future and, doing so, change the impact that
America has on behalf of freedom in the world,” Lewis
added.
David Liner, USAID deputy assistant administrator for legislative
and public affairs, said HIV/AIDS and the MCA will be front-burner
issues for the Foreign Operations Account. The Agency is also
following funding for a number of other programs, including
those on the environment, biodiversity, and basic education.
President Bush’s budget requests $9.1 billion in fiscal
year 2006 for development and humanitarian assistance carried
out by USAID. Among the highlights of the budget request are
$191 million for democracy, governance, conflict mitigation,
and human rights programs; $655 million for disasters and
famines; $885 million in food assistance; $451 million for
education; $433 million for agriculture and natural resources;
and $330 million for HIV/AIDS.
The budget also calls for $3 billion to expand the MCA and
$3.2 billion to continue the President’s Emergency Plan
for AIDS Relief.
New Funding Mechanism Facilitates Public-Private Alliances
USAID is now tapping a new funding mechanism that allows
missions and departments to initiate strategic partnerships
with for-profit and other nontraditional partners.
The new Collaboration Agreement is in response to a 2004
assessment of the Global Development Alliance’s (GDA)
business model, which found the Agency’s standard procurement
mechanisms were not always suited to the dynamics of building
public-private alliances.
The Collaboration Agreement also formalizes GDA’s relationships
with for-profit and other nontraditional partners—also
called resource partners—while keeping relationships
with more traditional implementing partners intact.
In the past, corporations that approached USAID often found
the Agency’s funding mechanisms daunting. Obligating
funds for public-private alliances through grants, cooperative
agreements, and contracts requires competition of new solicitations,
a waiver excepting the competition requirement, or modification
of an existing agreement with a commensurate scope of work.
Each of these options at times has proved cumbersome, and
in some cases planned alliances could not go forward. The
new funding mechanism provides an alternative.
“The Collaboration Agreement reflects the partnership
nature of public-private alliances, rather than the procurement
relationship implied by our standard funding mechanisms,”
said Jim Thompson, program analyst for the GDA Secretariat.
It “is a major step forward in enabling program staff
to strengthen development impact through public-private alliances.”
Administrator Andrew Natsios, who authorized the Collaboration
Agreement’s immediate use at the start of 2005, has long
stressed the need to tap into the wealth of resources found
in the private sector. These nontraditional partners do not
routinely work with USAID and they provide services that don’t
normally involve foreign development assistance.
Resource partners—including corporations and foundations—can
offer expertise in research and development, marketing and
distribution, market presence, and intellectual property,
Thompson said.
Other transactions authority is also used by the departments
of Homeland Security and Defense to allow partner corporations
to profit from innovations generated by the collaboration.
The new Collaboration Agreement is considered appropriate
when
- a nontraditional partner will receive USAID funds directly
and there is a compelling reason why federal and non-federal
resources would be jointly programmed.
- the alliance fits within the scope of work of an Annual
Program Statement or Request for Application.
- other funding mechanisms have been deemed unfeasible
or inappropriate.
The Collaboration Agreement will not replace standard funding
mechanisms.
“USAID’s other transactions authority permits
creativity in crafting the alliance agreement to achieve relationships
beyond that of a procurement or grant,” said Mark Walther,
who helped craft the new mechanism for the Office of Acquisition
and Assistance. “However, government oversight agencies
will review our use of this authority to ensure that it was
utilized to achieve results unable to be recognized through
traditional instruments and not to avoid procurement requirements
and restrictions.”
Program Evaluations Revisited With Eye To Reform
When a giant tsunami hit Indonesia and other Asian countries
in December, the USAID mission in Jakarta reacted immediately.
But it wanted to do so in the most effective way, so it sought
guidance by delving into evaluations of past programs addressing
natural disasters.
“There are a lot of lessons that can be learned from
projects that are closing, which can be shared with other
country programs,” said Cressida Slote, the monitoring
and evaluations officer at the Bureau for Europe and Eurasia.
The importance of program assessment is underscored by Administrator
Andrew Natsios’ recently launched Evaluations Revitalization
Initiative, a four-part effort that aims to improve the way
evaluations are done and used. The initiative also aims to
create a new practitioner’s guide and offer training
courses.
The Center for Development Information and Evaluation (CDIE)
has been tasked with spearheading the effort by reforming
evaluation policies, setting new standards for the studies,
and training evaluation officers. CDIE will continue to conduct
its own strategic evaluations for senior Agency staff.
Evaluations were a required practice for each Agency-backed
program until 1994. New USAID regulations then dropped that
requirement, and over the years fewer programs have been assessed
for results. Some 528 evaluations were submitted to the Agency’s
evaluations bank, the Development Experience Clearinghouse,
in 1994; that number fell to 79 in 2001.
“But there is a resurgence of interest in evaluations,”
said Slote, who is approached weekly by USAID bureau and mission
staff, as well as contractors who want guidance on assessing
a project.
Evaluations, she said, “help with being able to make
a management decision or understanding and gauging the impact
of our work, in order to know when to scale down a project
when we’re doing something right, or when we need to
make a change.”
In recent years, the Bureau for Africa and the Bureau for
Europe and Eurasia offered evaluation methods training courses
for their personnel, which resulted in a significant increase
in the quality of evaluations being done by the missions.
Such training will now be expanded to all bureaus.
CDIE is also increasing the Agency’s outreach with
others in the evaluation community by participating on panels
at professional meetings, such as the American Evaluation
Association. As the Agency’s focal point for evaluation,
CDIE will coordinate with other U.S. government entities and
explore possible joint evaluations with other donors and international
organizations.
U.S. Leads Rise in Flow of Global Foreign Assistance
Foreign assistance from the United States, 21 other donor
countries, and the European Union reached $69 billion in 2003,
according to the new annual report released Jan. 18 in Washington
by the Development Assistance Committee (DAC).
DAC Chairman Richard Manning said at the National Press
Club that “we are on the road” to cutting in half
the number of people living on less than $1 per day in the
next decade, mainly thanks to economic progress in China and
India, the world’s two most populous nations.
Aid by all donors is expected to rise to $88 billion by
2006, said the chief of the DAC, which is part of the Organisation
for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
But reaching the U.N. Millennium Goals of providing education
and child healthcare to much of the world’s poor is a
challenge, he added.
And he said it was “too early” to know whether
the HIV/AIDS pandemic will be adequately addressed by massive
U.S. and other donor programs. However, the DAC said in a
statement that the price of antiretroviral drugs has fallen
by 95 percent in the last few years.
Administrator Andrew Natsios told the Press Club meeting
that U.S. Overseas Development Assistance rose from about
$7 billion in 2000 to $16 billion in 2003 and will reach $19
billion in 2004.
Twenty-four percent of aid delivered by the 22 DAC donors
is given by the United States, followed by 13 percent by Japan,
Natsios said.
He also noted that private U.S. foundations, NGOs, corporations,
universities, and churches give four times as much aid as
the U.S. government.
Manning said that “sub-Saharan Africa is off-track
for pretty much all the [Millennium] goals.”
Efforts to assist poor countries through improving trade,
easing debt, and conflict resolution are all things “we
can do” he said.
However, he noted the importance of security to development
and the need to work on both of those at the same time.
“It is naive to suppose that development and progress
will automatically reduce conflict, but a massively unequal
world is bound to [stir resentment],” he said.
Manning noted that foreign aid was 0.33 percent of the gross
national income of the 30 Western countries in the OECD before
the Berlin Wall fell. Then aid fell to 0.22 percent in 1997,
rising to 0.25 percent in 2004 and possibly returning to 0.3
percent in the near future.
Referring to the massive outpouring of public and private
aid to the tsunami crisis, Manning said it was too early to
tell if the increase will be permanent. “It could turn
out negative if the public sees it as mishandled.”
“What may come out of the tsunami is wider understanding
of the problems of poor neighbors,” Manning said.
The relief effort has “gone well—we have avoided
a second round of death from disease,” he said.
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