Will USAID's extreme poverty agenda fall prey to 'initiative fatigue'?

Does the U.S. Agency for International Development’s “extreme poverty agenda” amount to an entirely new initiative — or is rather a repackaging of work the agency is already doing? “That’s a great question, and it’s one that’s asked every day in this building,” Alex Thier, USAID’s assistant to the administrator for policy, planning and learning, said at the Advisory Council for Voluntary Foreign Assistance meeting on Wednesday. USAID is working to align its programs with President Barack Obama’s call to help eliminate extreme poverty by 2030. But some agency staff and partners are losing their patience over the administration’s ever-expanding list of development and health initiatives and the metrics that accompany them. Officials have been trying to clarify — both internally and publicly — how the extreme poverty agenda fits in with other USAID priorities like Power Africa, food security, global health, climate change and resilience, and how they can ensure the various goals don’t take energy and resources away from each other. The question has come up often in recent weeks: What is the definition of an initiative exactly, and what is the added value of launching new ones? “We are looking at the main initiatives that have been launched by the Obama administration, first and foremost, to understand how those contribute to this [extreme poverty] agenda,” Thier noted. Last year’s survey on USAID conducted by the American Foreign Service Association included comments from several foreign service officers pointing to “a real feeling of ‘initiative fatigue’ in the field.” But according to Thier, those initiatives “contribute toward this [ending extreme poverty] goal.” “Understanding that, and then understanding how to capture and intensify it is going to be important,” Thier said. “How do we make these goals correspond to each other? How do we make preventing deaths due to HIV or due to lack of prenatal care — how do we make that mesh with the goal of eliminating extreme poverty?” Read more on U.S. aid reform online, and subscribe to The Development Newswire to receive top international development headlines from the world’s leading donors, news sources and opinion leaders — emailed to you FREE every business day.