USAID aims to dispel ‘urban legend’ about co-creation approach

For years, the U.S. Agency for International Development has been on a quest to broaden its partner base and make it easier for organizations that were not specifically engineered to win USAID funding to navigate its contracting and procurement processes. One approach the agency has tried is “co-creation,” which involves USAID officials and prospective partners working together to design solutions to specific development challenges. The thought is that collaboration early in the process can make USAID more open to both new ideas and the organizations that might bring them to the table — instead of simply issuing a prescribed funding opportunity and inviting organizations to bid on it. While many have welcomed the spirit of that approach, its actual implementation has received mixed reviews. Some who have participated in co-creation report that it can involve significant time and expense upfront with no guarantee that it ends in a project funded by USAID. Those can be challenging investments for organizations — particularly smaller ones — to justify. With the agency in the midst of another effort to increase the amount of its funding that goes to local organizations, USAID officials say they see co-creation as an important component. They also want prospective partners to know they have heard the complaints about how these approaches have been used in the past. During a webinar that the agency hosted Tuesday, one participant asked whether co-creation has been a successful approach from USAID’s perspective. “It seems to put a heavy burden on applicants, especially new and underutilized local organizations without guarantees or remunerations,” the participant said. “We have had this urban legend at the agency that co-design can only happen in large groups,” answered Chuck Pope, a senior regional adviser for the Middle East at USAID. “Large group co-design — bring everybody to an expensive hotel halfway around the world — we heard you all. That is very difficult for local implementing partners to do,” he said. Instead, Pope said that the co-creation he and his team have found successful starts with a concept note from an organization interested in working with USAID. That concept note is enough to satisfy the criteria for a competitive process, he said. Then a “passionate technical officer” from USAID works closely with a “passionate prospective implementing partner” to put together a program description and a budget. “It's a person-to-person process, which is what our agency is supposed to be about,” he said. “I have seen wild success with one-on-one co-design processes that have stood up to inspector general scrutiny, procurement evaluation system scrutiny,” he added. Pope said he has seen the process take as little as two weeks — or as long as two years, which he called “the bad extreme.”