Q&A: Why USAID is launching a website to help locally led bidders

In a recent speech, USAID Administrator Samantha Power outlined plans to increase the amount her agency spends with local contractors to 25%. One of the announcements in the speech was that a new website, WorkWithUSAID.org, would offer opportunities for NGOs to engage with the United States Agency for International Development for the first time. Devex talked to Matthew Johnson, industry liaison at USAID, about how the site will work and how USAID will make its localization goals a reality. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Why did you decide to launch the site? This came out of the work we’ve been doing on engaging with under-utilized partners. To achieve our ambition, we need to partner with organizations all around the world. Globally we’re already working with 3,000 organizations in 110 countries but we know there are a lot more potential partners out there. When we talked to the community about the barriers to getting involved with USAID, one thing we heard a lot was that people didn’t know where to start. This site is a response to that. It’s a centralized hub that lets us see who we can work with. How does it work? This website is intended to be a front door. There’s a host of resources. We’re asking organizations to do two main things. The first is to register information about your organization in our partner directories. As we do outreach work and partner research, we’ll be using those directories as a source. Right now, it’s hard to know who is out there and this gives us a platform to do that. The other day, for example, I was talking with one of our contracting officers in Vietnam when we were giving a demo of the website. He asked, “Can you pull me a list of every organization that is registered there in Vietnam?” So when we do outreach work and events, we’ll be able to connect with these organizations. The second thing we’re asking organizations to do is to take a preengagement assessment. This lets you understand your capacity to engage with USAID. It looks at things like your finances, your policies, your monitoring, and evaluation. You can check if you’re registered on all the right systems. “For us, the biggest challenge is having the sheer staff numbers to make localization work.” --— Matthew Johnson, industry liaison, USAID Then once you’ve done those things, we have custom learning and training that helps organizations build their capacity. We have a huge library of different resources. Once you’ve done the initial assessment, take a look at the country development cooperation strategy for your area. That outlines what our goals and objectives are in that country. See what the alignment is like with the work you are doing. Then sign up to the business forecast, and see if there is something coming which is suitable in your country. We’re also arranging matchmaking sessions with new organizations and organizations that are currently working with us. And we’re using the partner directory for that. So far we have 900 organizations on the system who have identified that they have never worked with us, and at least 15% of those have taken the preengagement assessment. What are the barriers to making localization work? We think there are three key things in the way we work that offer challenges. One is that we’re decentralized, with a lot of authority in our missions around the world. This is mostly a good thing, but it means that for organizations that want to engage with us, it can feel as if you’re working with a hundred different organizations. The second piece is knowing how your organization fits into our structures and policies. Organizations need to understand how what they’re trying to do matches up with what we’re trying to achieve in a country. The third thing is the procurement process itself. It’s about simplifying the process. Historically, it’s been hard to engage with. It’s been 40-50 page documents. It requires a lot of work and effort. So we’ve moved to just asking for 3-5 pages of concept notes up front. We’re really reducing the barriers to entry. We’ve tried to change how we do business to make it easier, but there are limits, because there are U.S. [United States] government rules and regulations we have to follow. For us, the biggest challenge is having the sheer staff numbers to make localization work. A $20,000 award to a small local organization probably takes more work than a $30 million award to an organization we work with all the time. So we need to have a large enough number of contract officers and staff to effectively manage the awards. Everyone in USAID sees the value of this. It’s really just down to us having the bandwidth to focus in on it. We tried to do it before, but we didn’t adequately staff it. What is USAID going to do next to make this happen? A definition of [what we mean by] “local” is in the works right now. There are so many different ways of defining what a local organization is. There are partners where their entire staff is local, but they are connected to a larger international organization. There’s a policy which is being drafted right now. It will be put out for public consultation in the next couple of months. We’re also looking at our definition of under-utilized partners. Right now, that’s organizations that receive less than $25 million. And all our missions overseas are currently writing two year action plans, looking at what additional efforts they can make to engage with these under-utilized partners. Those action plans are really going to drive the priorities the administrator outlined in her speech. There will be opportunities for NGOs to feed into that process. Our Pakistan office has issued a request for information, for example. We’re trying to build a picture of the local landscape, and that means there’s an opportunity for these organizations to engage with the consultation and feed in their priorities.