Q&A: Mark Green on how USAID transformation will impact program design

DES MOINES, Iowa — U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator Mark Green tells his team in Washington, D.C. at least once a week that they aren’t “doing development.” “Development’s out there. We can enable it, we can support it, we can help provide ideas. We have cross-fertilization of ideas — those are things that we can do,” Green said of those working in the agency’s headquarters. “But development’s still going to be done in Western Kenya, development’s still going to be done in India. It’s not going to be done in the Reagan Building.” Green said the agency’s transformation — which will see it stand up seven new bureaus — will help morph headquarters into customer service for the field, allowing local missions to be empowered in its work. His office in Washington is responsible for prioritizing investments and tracking metrics and outcomes, but ultimately, the field must drive the programming, Green said. “Resilience is a term that I was leery of using at first because I think in Washington for years it was a catchall phrase for everything, right? We mean it very precisely.” --— Mark Green, administrator, USAID One of the new bureaus will be that of resilience and food security, the restructuring of which Green says better reflects the reality of contexts in which USAID is increasingly working. The agency is now responding to an elevated level of crises around the globe caused by climate change, such as increased drought or storm frequency. “That’s always been a key part of work, but we’re having to do more and more,” Green said. Green sat down with Devex at the World Food Prize last week to discuss the true meaning of resilience, why USAID is streamlining its program design and implementation cycles, and how that will make the agency’s work more responsive to needs in the field. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Why is it strategically important to put USAID’s food security and resilience work together in a new bureau? I look at the world right now and increasingly, the pressures of crisis are affecting our ability to help countries become more self-reliant, particularly in terms of food security. You’ve got places like Ethiopia, which has been facing consistent cycles of drought. You’ve got all the pressures coming from Venezuelans being forced to flee, to challenges in places like Yemen. So if we’re going to meet our mission of bolstering food security and with that creating livelihood opportunities, we need to help countries be more resilient in the face of those shocks and stresses. I’m not sure I fully appreciated that until I came to the agency. I can’t think of a corner of the world that isn’t facing, in some place, these flows and shocks and stresses right now. It’s the way we perform our mission. When you say shocks, what are you referring to? Climate change? Conflict? fragility? Yes. There are so many challenges that are facing families right now. We have always helped communities and countries deal with changing climate, the fallout from weather conditions, whether it be helping to protect against mudslides in places like Indonesia to helping Ethiopia with drought-resistant seed. Resilience is a term that I was leery of using at first because I think in Washington for years it was a catchall phrase for everything, right? We mean it very precisely. We are talking about bolstering and fortifying against shocks and stresses and there is no better term to describe it. That’s true resilience work. It’s not the humanitarian work. It’s taking Feed the Future which is, for my money, our most important economic development tool right now because every country has to get this right in order to be able to advance. If they don’t have it right, there’s a ceiling there. And Feed the Future has been a phenomenal success. So now what we want to do is essentially strengthen Feed the Future by adding these elements because there’s a risk of backsliding and there’s a risk of countries whose gains may be somewhat fragile, teetering as a result of the stress. It makes sense from a number of vantage points. How did the agency decide this was a change that needed to be made? As with everything else that we’ve done and are doing with transformation, these were not ideas that came from me. I went to our career staff leads and basically said, “This is your opportunity. Give me your best ideas. I don’t care where they come from, I don’t care if it’s a past administration, I don’t care, whatever. Give me your best ideas.” This was one of those ideas that came forward and had been fleshed out and led by our food security career professionals. So it makes sense from so many standpoints. What’s been rewarding here in Des Moines is that everyone has said, “yeah, this makes sense.” I guess we’re getting it right. When it comes to the impact of climate change on agriculture, farmers are saying they need the newest technology to fight the impact out of research labs and into their hands faster. How is USAID going to do this? One of the most important changes that we’re making at USAID is changing program design and implementation cycles. So we are engaging wherever we can in true collaboration: co-creation, co-design, and co-financing. I came from an implementing partner, I’ve been on that side, and what would happen too often is that — not just USAID but every funding development agency in the world — they would sit off by themselves, they would design a program, go to the private sector and say “here, can you kind of do this for us?” What? Instead of saying “OK, we all recognize that here’s the challenge, here’s the opportunity. We want your best ideas. Let’s put this together, together [sic]. Let’s figure this out based upon what you see, what we see.” We each bring capacities to the table. In our case, it’s often the networks that we have, the ability to test technologies, also the ability to convene and to be policy advocates. I used to always say this: If you’re a host country, if you’re, let’s say, an African government and a private corporation comes in and says “We’d like you to use our technology, and we can help.” The head of state, very rightly, is going to say you are… who? Instead, what we say: “We’ve been working together for a long time. We share goals here. These are some things that we’ve learned.” So I think we have the ability to also speed up host country analysis, approvals, and deployment so we can shorten that period of time. And that is a very important part. It’s also why our colleagues at the State Department are crucial to this, too. We need every one of our ambassadors in the developing world to be advocates. We need them to be constantly talking to host country counterparts because there’s not enough time to sit around and waste. Things are happening pretty quickly.