In its quest to channel more funding to local organizations, the U.S. Agency for International Development should stop letting “the perfect be the enemy of the good enough,” according to a former procurement official who worked at USAID for two decades.
“In a perfect world, 10,000 extra organizations would be getting direct awards, but that’s not going to happen due to AID’s staffing situation,” said Chuck Pope, who retired from USAID in April 2022 as a commissioned foreign service officer and senior contracting and agreement officer.
The “good enough” approach, according to Pope, would be to issue larger awards to experienced organizations and then require them to disburse the majority of that funding to local subawardees while working to build their capacity as USAID implementing partners.