Elizabeth Warfield’s vision for USAID Local Solutions

It’s been nearly two years since Elizabeth Warfield took on the role of coordinator of Local Solutions, the U.S. Agency for International Development’s aid localization agenda under USAID Forward. During that time, USAID’s aid localization strategy has undergone an observable — and many U.S. experts and implementers say, welcome — shift. Back then, USAID’s 30 percent local spending target for fiscal 2015 was front and center in USAID’s aid localization agenda. High-level agency officials touted USAID’s progress toward that ambitious goal as proof positive of the agency’s commitment to locally owned development. A Devex analysis also published today reveals that USAID may well fall short of the 30 percent target for now. Today, “100 percent sustainability” — the end goal where USAID is using all of its resources to build and sustain local systems — seems to be the principal driver of Local Solutions. In April of last year, USAID unveiled a framework document spelling out the agency’s new, system-centric approach to aid localization. Devex spoke with Warfield to learn more about why she believes “100 percent sustainability” is now the right way forward for Local Solutions and how USAID intends to measure progress toward that goal. Here is an excerpt from our conversation. How does USAID define “100 percent sustainability” in Local Solutions? Local Solutions is not just about putting funding directly through local systems. Its real focus is on the end game, which is USAID’s commitment to sustainability and country ownership. In April 2014, the agency issued Local Systems: a Framework for Sustainable Development, which defines sustainability as the ability of local systems to sustain and produce desired outcomes over time. And local systems refers to those interconnected set of actors — governments, civil society, universities, the private sector and individual citizens — that jointly produce a particular development outcome. That really now is the foundation or the basis on which we execute Local Solutions. That it’s about sustainability — creating the conditions whereby countries can sustain their own development. And that means that you need to have strong, effective civil society, strong effective private sector and strong effective government working together. What is the rationale for USAID’s increasing emphasis on “100 percent sustainability” as opposed to the 30 percent local spending target? The 30 percent is focused on individual organizations — the systems paper is not about the sustainability of individual organizations per se. It’s about the sustainability of results. Because most times, you don’t get significant development results that sustain by just giving a grant to one [nongovernmental organization] or assistance to one government entity. It’s how you bring more multistakeholder alliances together around a common cause with shared values, executing transformational change — whether that’s ending child death or getting more kids reading. That’s a broader framework. Is USAID sticking by its 30 percent local spending target? What now is the meaning of the 30 percent target to USAID? Previously, the driver for this reform effort was the 30 percent target; the driver now is strategic thinking: What’s your strategy? How is it relevant to directly using local systems? The 30 percent had already been messaged as aspirational even before I took this position, and we continue to monitor it as a barometer of whether we are headed in the right direction. But it is not the sole measure of our progress or the most important measure of success. The measure of success is by making a given set of investments in countries, the 100 percent investments — are we sustaining our investments in X, Y and Z country and, implicit in that, part of that equation needs to be direct use of local systems to prove the effectiveness of those local systems so that they can sustain on their own. So it’s aspirational, a barometer of progress. However, since the driver now is their strategy, we empower missions to come forward with what they think makes sense. What kinds of metrics is USAID developing to measure “100 percent sustainability”? [The U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief] has a sustainability dashboard. They are also measuring country ownership. And are we making sure that we have a more comprehensive sustainability and country ownership measures across all of our initiatives and earmarks? Yes, we’re working on that step by step. You can default to the funds obligated and that’s easy — yes, it’s important, but what is more important are the results that you’re getting and how effective is that organization or system in getting those results and did those results sustain? It’s not something that we’re going to just go out and issue. We’re going to have that conversation with our external partners and be sure that we’re bringing our best knowledge to the table in terms of how we seek a broader set of results. The challenge is to create a results architecture that keeps attention focused simultaneously on outputs and outcomes and on the conditions of the system that will produce these outputs and outcomes over time. So the first step is to expand the conception of results to include key attributes of a well-functioning system as well as the outcomes and outputs it produces. And the second step is to develop reliable ways of measuring those attributes, so yes, we will be working on that and we will be sharing where we are on that. One aspect of this work is revising how we measure organizational capacity development, and we will be sharing our draft recommendations with the external community in July. With the benefit of hindsight, should USAID Forward have focused on “100 percent sustainability” as opposed to the 30 percent local spending target from the very beginning? USAID Forward is much bigger than Local Solutions. Unless you understand that broader USAID Forward frame, you can’t understand the context of Local Solutions. USAID Forward is about standing up a policy bureau, a programming bureau, a budget bureau that didn’t exist before. It’s about doubling our foreign service staffing, it’s about direct engagement of our staff locally, it’s about mentoring our staff who have been here less than 5 years, and fundamentally, it’s about bringing back in a 21st century way the development discipline, which is known as the program cycle, which basically in very simple terms says very clearly this is what I’m going to try and accomplish, this is my measure of success, and developing strategies and programs around that. And so that’s the fundamental shift upon which Local Solutions sits — we’re not an island. We’re not separate. There’s a lot of organizational change right now and Local Solutions is working in parallel with other changes. Check out more insights and analysis for global development leaders like you, and sign up as an Executive Member to receive the information you need for your organization to thrive.