Squeezed by a dwindling operational budget, beginning in the 1990s, the U.S. Agency for International Development aggressively turned to private companies and nongovernmental organizations in the United States to carry out much of its development work around the world. In the decades since, U.S.-based implementing partners in the Beltway and beyond have largely cornered the billions in contracts and grants that USAID awards each year.
Three years into USAID Forward — Administrator Rajiv Shah’s agencywide reform drive — that is beginning to change. As Devex’s recent report on USAID’s local spending found, the agency is now more than halfway (17.9 percent) toward its target of channeling 30 percent of its funding to local organizations by fiscal 2015.
In our second report on USAID’s local spending, Devex ranks the agency’s 20 top local implementing partners in fiscal 2013. That year, USAID obligated $748 million in funding to local implementing partners — which we consider to include entities outside the host government such as educational institutions as well as nonprofit and for-profit organizations.