Devex: USAID needs to increase agility in conflict environments, official says
“U.S. foreign assistance agencies must learn how to be more agile in executing and then evaluating the effectiveness of programming in conflict environments, said U.S. Agency for International Development Assistant Administrator for the Bureau of Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance Robert Jenkins. … Jenkins said the current bureaucratic process of developing USAID’s five-year country development cooperation plans doesn’t allow the agency to be able to evaluate programming in real-time and adapt if something is not working as intended or if conditions on the ground have shifted since a program was conceived. … As part of USAID’s transformation, the agency’s conflict and prevention activities are being separated from humanitarian assistance into a standalone Bureau of Conflict and Prevention. Jenkins said his team has been empowered by USAID Administrator Mark Green to design a new way of working that is better adapted to the rapid pace of change around the world in many conflict environments, and to try to eliminate bureaucratic processes that prevent agility…” (Welsh, 1/31).