Understanding USAID's Business Forecast data

Click here to view the new Devex interactive visualization of USAID Business Forecast opportunities The U.S. Agency for International Development held its second quarter Business Forecast conference call last week, open to its many partners, suppliers and interested parties. This quarter’s call was particularly important because it is the first since USAID released their new web-based portal with access to Business Forecast data. USAID’s Business Forecast was, until recently, a large spreadsheet released every quarter to USAID partners. It gave the details of future opportunities to do business with USAID, including budget estimates, planned solicitation and award dates, and brief descriptions of the needed goods, works and services. The Business Forecast has long been an important resource used by USAID partners for business planning and development. The new web tool, launched Jan. 31, is changing business development for USAID partners. The portal provides the same information as the old, quarterly spreadsheets, but it is accessible online, searchable and updated in real time. On last Tuesday’s call, several officers from USAID’s Office of Acquisitions and Assistance answered submitted questions from partners, many of whom sought to better understand this new tool. Devex analysis and interactive visualization of USAID business forecast data Devex sat in on the call and has been analyzing the initial data released via the new business forecast portal. All individual forecast opportunities are posted in our Funding Activity Feed, Devex’s stream of early-stage funding updates. The team also built a live geographic and sectoral visualization of Business Forecast opportunities to help our members see the bigger picture. Let’s dive deeper into what we learned on the call and from the data itself. The FY 2017 Q2 USAID Business Forecast call • The basics: All planned contracts, grants and cooperative agreements estimated to cost over $150,000 will be posted on the new Business Forecast portal. Solicitations should be released for an opportunity within 12 months of their appearance in the Business Forecast. The data comes directly from the agency’s acquisition and assistance plan. • Business Forecast data updates: Unlike the previous quarterly releases, changes to the BF are now live. Any changes made in the A&A plan inside the agency’s systems are immediately reflected in the BF portal. USAID has added a field in each opportunity — “Last Updated” — which displays the last date and time that such an update was made. An older field, “Business Forecast Status Change,” also provides insight into the recent changes, including changes in anticipated solicitation release or award dates. • Live downloadable Excel sheet: The new portal allows you to download the entire Business Forecast as an Excel spreadsheet, similar to the files that were previously released every quarter. The Excel file is updated at the same time any information in the portal is updated, and thus both are always “live”. At Devex we currently capture all updates made to the new Business Forecast portal. Each opportunity appears as an entry in our Funding Activity Feed. This feed shows all the early and insider information we gather related to funding from USAID as well as other funders. The new Business Forecast portal is already fed live into the feed so that new opportunities are quickly republished in Devex. Insight into the current Business Forecast Devex took a closer look at the details of the Business Forecast’s data to see what we can learn about USAID’s planned opportunities for partners in the coming 12 months. As of March 8 — 36 days after the January 31 release date of the new web portal — USAID’s Business Forecast contained 248 opportunities, released by 81 different operating units, including 59 country missions, and 22 offices, bureaus and regional missions. The way USAID estimates its budgets can be problematic for analysis. All opportunity values are bucketed into ranges rather than assigned discrete values — ranges such as $150,000 to $300,000, or $1 million to $3.99 million. This makes adding together the values of the opportunities complex. We took two approaches: the simpler method is to average each opportunity’s minimum and maximum budget figure together to arrive a not-too-low, not-too-high, single budget number. The second method is to take a group of opportunities and sum their minimum budget values and the maximum budget values. These two sums represent the minimum and the maximum USAID expects to spend on that group of opportunities — effectively a larger budget range for the group. Using the first method, we find that the total Business Forecast on March 8 had a “middle” value of about $12.9 billion dollars. The second method range gives a budget range with a minimum of $9.1 billion and a maximum of $16.6 billion dollars. You can see how these figures break in their geographic and sectoral distributions with our visualization of the USAID Business Forecast, available here. The most “to-be-funded” sectors and missions from the March 8 Business Forecast offer a glimpse of where USAID’s future priorities lie. Global health is clearly the sector of focus, with both a number of pipeline projects and a high value attached to its opportunities. If you dig into the opportunities in this sector, you’ll find several open Africa-focused projects, including health system projects in Kenya and the DRC. If we look at which USAID missions, bureaus and offices will be managing opportunities, we see some other interesting patterns. Both the Office for Health Infectious Diseases and Nutrition and the Office of Population and Reproductive Health will manage multiple high-value ($300 million to $1 billion) projects. This accounts for USAID's sectoral focus on global health that we saw before. Among the country missions with the largest pipelines are Nigeria, the DRC and the Gaza Strip, where large health and water focused opportunities are being planned. One other interesting aspect of the Business Forecast is the anticipated solicitation release dates of opportunities. Of the 248 opportunities listed in the forecast on March 8, 105 had anticipated solicitation release dates in the past. 58 of these 105 had an associated solicitation number, which indicates that the solicitation process is underway. One can search for this number on our Devex funding pages to find the opportunity’s details. 47 of these 105 did not have solicitation numbers — they are “past-due” for the release of their solicitation documents. Digging deeper, we found that 12 of those 47 do have released solicitations in fedbizopps.gov or grants.gov, but they were not listed in the Forecast. That leaves 35 past-due opportunities. This would seem to indicate that there may be a delay between the release of a solicitation and the reflection of that fact in the new Business Forecast portal, or it may mean that those 35 opportunities are simply delayed in their preparation. The creation of the Business Forecast web portal improves the timeliness and transparency of USAID’s early-stage funding data and priorities. There will likely be discrepancies in the data released for the first few months — particularly with regard to shifting dates for solicitation releases and awards — but this is part of doing business with USAID, as many partners will understand. The 12 past-due opportunities that actually do have solicitation documents available are linked below for convenience: • Communities and Renewable Energy — Mexico RFA-523-17-000001 • Hamro Samman: Project to Improve Sustainability and Further Strengthen Institutions — Nepal RFA-367-17-000001 • University Centers for Career Development (UCCD) – Egypt RFA-263-17-000001 • Regional Coastal Biodiversity Project — Central America RFA-596-17-000002 • Defeat Tuberculosis — Uganda RFA-617-17-000004 • Strategic Health Information System (HIS) Program — Haiti RFA-521-17-000008 • USAID Power the Future Activity in Central Asia — Central Asia SOL-176-17-000002 • Feed the Future Bangladesh Nutrition Activity — Bangladesh SOL-388-17-000006 • Energy Utility Partnership Program (EUPP) — Worldwide RFA-OAA-17-000007 • Lebanon Enterprise Development (LED) Project — Lebanon SOL-268-17-000001 • Integrated Health Systems Strengthening and Service Delivery Activity — Pakistan RFA-391-17- 000003 • Trade and Competitiveness (TAC) Activity — Ukraine SOL-121-17-000007 All opportunities listed by USAID in the new Business Forecast portal are now posted on Devex’s Funding Activity Feed. 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