Q&A: USAID West Africa chief says his division's tactics are 'unique in the USAID world'

ABIDJAN — For the West Africa Regional branch of the United States Agency for International Development, a longstanding priority has focused on collaborating with multinational organizations to create regional solutions to problems facing the 15 countries comprising the Economic Community of West African States. In this region, flush with natural resources and human capital, limited private investments, poor governance, insecurity, extreme poverty, and even disease and evidences of global warming often stymie development efforts. To address these challenges, the USAID West Africa Regional Mission based in Accra, Ghana, believes it takes a unique regional approach to provide solutions and capacity building tools in countries where there is no country-level USAID mission. “Many of the issues or challenges that the countries in West Africa face are similar whether terrorism, climate change, trade or health pandemics,” USAID West Africa Regional Mission Director Alex Deprez told Devex. “All of the countries are facing the same challenges and instead of taking each issue piecemeal, through a bilateral approach, we try to look at how these issues affect the region as a whole and help African states come up with common solutions to common problems.” Devex spoke to Deprez about the role of the USAID West Africa Regional mission in regional development efforts and how it puts youth at the core of its programming. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Can you talk to me about USAID’s historical presence in this region? We have been operating for a long time in the region. There have been different iterations but at least through the last decade we have been focused on supporting regional organizations to create regional solutions to these common problems facing all the countries. Our USAID West Africa Regional platform based in Accra is kind of unique among USAID’s worldwide deployment in the fact that we support regional organizations and implement regional programs on a large scale to support African solutions to Africa’s problems. Can you go into detail about what some of the solutions are that USAID has helped implement in West Africa? What does USAID West Africa see as priority sectors that require support at this time? We really try to align our programs and our support to Africa’s own priorities and give them the tools. ECOWAS sets strategies and policies and regulations applicable to all their member states so we align to their priorities. Their highest priority these days is peace and security. We are working with ECOWAS along those lines on several fronts. First, giving them the capacity to have an early warning capacity for conflict prevention and mitigation. We’ve been working with the commission [directorate] for Political Affairs, Peace and Security to create a network across the 15 member states that can provide information from the bottom up, that flows from the vulnerable conflict-prone communities to the subnational and national level and up to the peace and security commission. “So, how do we get the 15 countries to use the comparative advantage that they have, facilitate trade so that more investments can come in, more jobs can be created, greater agricultural productivity can ensue.” --— Alex Deprez, USAID West Africa regional mission director We’ve focused somewhat on election-related crisis response, but we have broadened it to food security crises: The capability to be alerted and respond to health crises, as well. The grant agreement that was signed in November in Abuja, Nigeria, was to fund our work around ECOWAS’ early warning conflict prevention and mitigation capacity. In everything that we do with these regional organizations, there’s always a strong component of institutional capacity support. In other words, we believe if the institution is made strong, if its human resources systems, financials, and other modalities of accountability are strengthened, its credibility is therefore strengthened, its performance is therefore strengthened, and they are more capable to take on the challenges that they face. Can you pinpoint ways that the ECOWAS bloc and its member states can make itself a more attractive investment environment? Beyond security and stability, because that’s the bedrock of all development, there are two areas where there’s a lot of need — but also a lot of opportunity — and where ECOWAS is uniquely positioned to make a difference. The first is trade and investment. ECOWAS, in its charter and mandate from the beginning has progressed toward creating a common market with a free flow of goods and services with no borders. This was in the initial charter, and it’s not easy, but there has been gradual progress toward achieving that goal. And if fully achieved, it creates a market the same size as the market of the United States — over 350 million inhabitants that are due to grow to 500 million by 2050. There’s a huge opportunity here with this common trade market for a lot of investment opportunities, for American and European firms, and local investors as well. They’ve adopted a lot of very progressive measures to make it happen, a common external tariff for exports. All members of ECOWAS share one passport and gain visa-free entry into member states. Other measures need to be taken at the national level so that all of the protocols of the common market can be put in place and enforced. Better trade gives better access to markets, better access to markets gives way to more investment opportunities. More investment opportunities translate into more jobs, so we see it as important to support ECOWAS in this endeavor. The second program area is food security and agricultural development. A small portion of West Africa’s arable land is actually being exploited with the potential to do more. We believe that there needs to be more investment in value-added agriculture. Free trade will improve the parameters for agriculture, which will create more demand to incite production. Where we focus is on inputs. Traditionally, the African farm is very low tech, smallholders with insufficient technologies and inputs. Making improved seeds available across the region so that one seed producer in one country can have their seeds certified for sale and use in other countries. We work with seed producers and agriculture researchers, or institutions, to develop improved varieties that will provide higher yields. That’s very important because the basis of the strong agriculture success we have in the U.S. is based on technology: Improved seeds, high-yielding varieties are an important factor. Are there any other areas of focus? Another area is fertilizer. To improve yields for smallholders, fertilizer plays a key role, so we are working with the 15 member states on adapting common standards, common regulations, so that fertilizer can be bought and sold across the countries. The idea here is that no one country can produce all the seeds, all the fertilizer that it needs. So, how do we get the 15 countries to use the comparative advantage that they have, facilitate trade so that more investments can come in, more jobs can be created, greater agricultural productivity can ensue. Also to ensure productivity and that more income goes to the producers, we focus on some key commodities. We’ve supported the cashew sector for more than a decade now, which has become a great success story for all of the cashew-producing countries, such as Côte d’Ivoire. We also focus on the shea value chain and mango. Those commodities are usually produced in the lesser developed zones of the region and ensure that those producers gain more income through value-added processing and transformation. How important is the energy sector to regional integration and development progress in the West Africa region? The Power Africa initiative is an example where we decided that the most transformative investment throughout West Africa is energy. Power generation brings electricity, electricity brings jobs for small- and medium-enterprises, better performance and better services to schools and hospitals — more access to energy really serves to catalyze economic growth and development across the economy. From our regional perspective, we are investing in supporting the West African Power Pool. What the WAPP does is build an infrastructure of connectivity through power lines; essentially it’s building power lines from power plants to consumer. Power generation tends to be in the coastal states where you have gas, oil, and hydro, so in countries like Ghana, Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire. How do you get that power up to the Sahelian landlocked countries? With our help, over $8.5 billion has been leveraged in infrastructure financing by the WAPP to move forward the transmission interconnection of the ECOWAS countries and to launch a regional power market that will help unlock up to 10,000 megawatts in generation capacity across the region. We think that’s a game-changer in terms of powering SMEs, and we have a very significant and renewable, off-grid component to our support. To ensure that this energy market functions and can be profitable to all, we are supporting a regional electricity regulatory agency that will set the rules in the power sector. With the sectors that USAID is supporting, where do youth fit into the equation considering the current demographic bulge the region is experiencing? “All of our programs focus on youth.” --— We support the Young African Leaders Initiative — here in Accra we have a regional training center where we have already trained 2,000 young people from across the region. ECOWAS member states need a new generation of leaders, so we have a very robust, aggressive training plan to support a new generation of leaders. On the large youth bulge, all of our programs focus on youth. I just came from a kickoff focused on ending AIDS in West Africa by 2020. Here the focus will be on youth and the key populations — specifically youth in Togo, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire — that continue to propagate the epidemic. I’m talking about the commercial sex workers, men who sleep with men, and drug users. This group is the focus of our activity. Another activity focused on youth is family planning. We are the locust in partnership with other donors including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the European Union and others. Our family planning activities are exclusively focused on youth. Our support to combat violent extremism, to support communities against the scourge of violent extremism is almost exclusively focused on youth, as are our agriculture training programs. Through a sectoral approach, we take youth as our number one target, partner, and beneficiary of the different activities that we have ongoing. Stay tuned for part two of our conversation with USAID West Africa Regional Mission Director Alex Deprez on the mission’s current renewed focus on peace and security.