USAID held its quarterly business forecast call last week, and an analysis of the forecast itself shows year-on-year reductions in projected spending. The call focused on how to help local partners. We’ve got a full rundown and an interactive guide.
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Falling forecast
USAID still plans to spend $25.6 billion in the coming months, which is nothing to be sneezed at. But it’s a cut of $4.8 billion on the same forecast a year ago. What’s caused the reduction?
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Basically, several big contracts have been pulled from the forecast, often because they’ve been awarded, or they’re in the process of being tendered. The largest of them is a NextGen contract, part of USAID’s largest ever suite of contracts, which was listed as being worth up to $2.5 billion, and was eventually awarded to seven groups for a total of $2.2 billion.
Meanwhile, the forecast call addressed several issues.
One of the key ones was new partners. USAID has introduced a number of measures to make it easier for new organizations to compete against its legacy suppliers. One is the opportunity to submit short concept notes at the first stage of a grant application. And another is translation. As of this week, the agency’s WorkWithUSAID.gov platform is now available in French and Spanish, with an Arabic translation “on the way.” And a new program is translating solicitation and funding announcements into Amharic, Arabic, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swahili.
USAID has also launched a new platform to track the agency’s private sector partnerships, going back to 2001.
Interact with the data: How USAID plans to spend $25.6B in the coming months (Pro)
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Funding activity
We publish tenders, grants, and other funding announcements on our Funding Platform. Here are some of the ones that have been viewed the most in the past 10 days.
The African Development Bank approved a €2 million grant for enhancing food and water security and access to electricity in Burundi.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is seeking a consultancy firm for a project to build gender-sensitive health information and digital health systems in Ethiopia.
German funder BMZ has contributed €15 million ($16.4 million) in funding to help keep girls and boys in primary schools in Afghanistan.
The main EU development funder DG-INTPA has announced a €2.67 million ($2.8 million) grant competition to combat forced labor and child labor and promote human rights and democracy in India.
The New Development Bank has announced a $481 million project to alleviate environmental pollution and support the power sector in Bangladesh.
USAID has a $34 million open call to enhance health system resilience in Uganda.
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Inside the World Bank
The World Bank is one of the largest funders in development, and it’s going through a well-publicized set of reforms. But how does it work? For those new to the bank, it’s not intuitive to understand how its various arms fit together and how decisions are made.
We’ve produced a full guide to help with this, which will be available to download later this month. For now, here’s an exclusive summary, only for our Pro members.
Read: The World Bank and its institutions — a primer (Pro)
How much cash gets to the global south?
Headline official development assistance is a useful figure if you want to track donor effort. How much cash are wealthy nations expending on supporting development? But that covers a multitude of different activities, including funding multilateral agencies and spending on refugee costs at home. Once we exclude those, how much actually reaches the nations of the global south in a form they have some control over?
To track this, OECD introduced a new measure in 2007: country programmable aid. And it turns out it's a lot less than ODA.
Read: How much ODA reaches low- and middle-income countries? (Pro)
Read the rest of our ODA series:
• How much ODA does each country get? (Pro)
• Where do the top donors spend their ODA? (Pro)
• Why do some countries get more aid than others? (Pro)
‘The abyss’
It’s well known by now in the world of development that USAID is trying — and struggling — to transfer more funding and power to local people.
But how well is USAID responding to local voices in shaping that process?
Not as well as it could, according to a new report from Save the Children US, whose leaders say there is no robust guidance and no standard procedure to involve local organizations in USAID policy making. One local leader says that when you do give feedback on a draft policy, it feels as if that comment “disappears into the abyss,” which is presumably not exactly what USAID is hoping for.
So is USAID improving, and how can it go further? The report has some ideas.
Read: Are local voices shaping USAID policies? A new report says not quite
+ For the last few years, localization has been the number one item on the agenda for USAID and for many other leaders in the field of development. Devex has been charting the journey that the sector has taken on the subject since the start of the decade, and we’ve brought together all our coverage in a single report — first published in 2022 and now updated to bring us into the present day. Download our report: The localization agenda 2.0.
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About the author
David Ainsworth@daveainsworth4
David Ainsworth is business editor at Devex, where he writes about finance and funding issues for development institutions. He was previously a senior writer and editor for magazines specializing in nonprofits in the U.K. and worked as a policy and communications specialist in the nonprofit sector for a number of years. His team specializes in understanding reports and data and what it teaches us about how development functions.
