In late 2017, USAID announced a framework focusing on the “journey to self-reliance” — a bid to orient the agency’s work toward achieving “a time when foreign assistance is no longer necessary.” The framework has been both criticized and cautiously embraced by the international development community, but whatever you think about it, it is having important effects on procurement with USAID.
The agency has since released a new Acquisition and Assistance Strategy, which changes how it will choose partners and award funding in line with the framework. The first “principle” of the strategy is to diversify its partner base, with special emphasis on working with new, underutilized, or local partners, or locally established partners. Those terms have been tightly defined to ensure they prioritize locally led entities and not just local subsidiaries of global organizations. The goal is to address the concentration of USAID awards within a “relatively small circle of large organizations” to encourage more collaborative approaches to development with local partners and to better develop local capacity.
Now, one year into the implementation of the A&A Strategy, we analyze USAID spending data to better understand the dynamics motivating these decisions. How concentrated are USAID funding awards historically? How important are local contractors? To answer these and other questions, we looked at the last five years of USAID spending data for prime awards from USAspending.gov.