Although 2019 got off to a slow start for the U.S. Agency for International Development due to the U.S. government shutdown, organizations have to date largely been unaffected from a funding perspective, continuing to work using prior year funds. Devex took a look at the 2018 segment of these funds by analyzing data extracted from USAspending.
In total, USAID awarded $16.7 billion in funding in the 2018 fiscal year, which is a 0.4 percent increase from fiscal year 2017. This increase is primarily evident in the assistance awards spending which totaled $11.9 billion, up 2.9 percent from the previous year. Contract award funding dropped to $4.8 billion from $5.1 billion in 2017.
We have analyzed both contract and assistance awards and, as was the case in our 2017 analysis, figures are based on federal action obligations, the U.S. federal government’s obligations (or sometimes de-obligations) for award transactions. This is the most conservative quantification of an award’s value, as it does not include the values of any additional options attached to it.