The New Partnerships Initiative: Reflections on Year 1
In 2019, USAID launched the New Partnerships Initiative, a critical component of its Acquisition and Assistance Strategy and an outgrowth of the Agency’s Effective Partnering and Procurement Reform project. Since then, 14 NPI awards have been made totaling up to $200 million in funding to support a variety of programs ranging from global health to conflict prevention and recovery. In addition, other USAID programs have realigned with the goals of targeting new and underutilized partners, using co-creation in awards and sub-awards,  and emphasizing local capacity strengthening.

Randy Tift, USAID Chief Acquisition and Assistance Policy Officer and one of NPI’s architects, looks back on the initiative’s first year. 

Q: Looking back, what was a critical first step to implementing NPI? 

A: One of the earliest challenges that we needed to meet was to connect the two strategic objectives of diversifying the partner base and changing how we partner to achieve more effective local engagement. 

One important answer was broadening the definition of local partners to include U.S. and international organizations that work through locally led operations with a sustained in-country presence. We set criteria with a new policy a few weeks before launching NPI. 

Now supporting local partners means leveraging more assets on the ground–and that’s essential to enabling our country partners to become  more self reliant and to lead in their own development. NPI is an effort to operationalize those objectives. 

Q: In other words, you are expanding the kinds of partners USAID is trying to engage with through NPI.

A: Yes. NPI is targeting both local entities–civil society groups, faith-based organizations, small businesses and others–as well as what we call locally established partners, or international organizations that have locally led operations and often significant private or non-U.S. Government funding.

We also want our traditional U.S.-based partners to engage by emphasizing local partnerships. We are slowly changing the way all of USAID and our partner community look at this idea–creating a diversity of targeted, customized approaches to elevating local leadership and empowering local development actors. All those things are critical and fundamental to what NPI is doing and to supporting our partner countries on their Journey to Self-Reliance.

Q: Do you ever have any challenges recruiting local partners?

A: I would say the only thing that holds us back is not being accessible for those partners that have not worked with us and have a lot to contribute, but, over the years, have not been able to overcome the complex solicitation requirements of USAID. 

Our traditional partners know that they have to monitor the two communications channels for acquisition and assistance and that's Fed Biz Ops [now sam.gov] and grants.gov. The vast majority of even significant, well-established development actors who are not USAID partners don't know how to do that and can't afford the resources to do that. So our job is to get better at targeting those partners, marketing to those partners, and lowering the barriers to entry.

Q: Are there any obstacles in getting new and local partners on board?

A: At USAID we do require a pre-award assessment to make sure that a partner is going to be compliant–that’s why NPI looked immediately at short-term solutions. One of those tools is the more strategic use of sub-awards. 

A big part of NPI is to target our experienced traditional partners to apply for awards that we call mentoring awards. They direct between 50 and 75% of the total award amount to sub-awards, usually to local partners, to equip those partners to lead in the program activity management and even to take full ownership of the development objectives of the award. 

In other words, the experienced prime partner shifts from a lead implementer role to a mentoring role, strengthening local capacity by providing technical oversight and compliance support to local partners.

So that's a very different way of working. We do see it once in a while, but it's a significant change for most of the Agency.

Q: Can you share a real-world example of the full benefit of NPI? 

A:  The first action NPI launched was a priority of the Middle East Bureau to identify local partners in Iraq to provide urgently needed assistance to religious and ethnic minorities that had been targeted by ISIS.  Now in this case, the Bureau really wanted local entities because of their influence and reach in these communities, and that's why the program approach of NPI is meant to be very flexible.

There was a lot of high-profile attention on this particular action and a very short time requirement. Most of the folks in the Middle East bureau and even in the procurement shop said, "You won’t be able to do it that fast."

Well, we did. We took the NPI model we had developed and embedded a contracting officer with technical office staff in the Middle East bureau and an expedited procurement action team led the charge and did not cut any corners in terms of the collaborative approach we call co-creation.

They issued the solicitation, they got concept papers back. They identified partners for a co-creation exercise, which was a workshop in the field and follow-up actions with some of those partners. They ended up with six awards, some of them representing different consortia that the co-creation helped enable, and those awards were made in record time. Our first NPI action demonstrated we can do it. 

Q: How do you see the future with so many difficult challenges ahead, from the COVID-19 pandemic to climate issues?

A: I think there’s a risk of defaulting back to old ways of working. So I go back to what I said about the strategic use of sub-awards–it’s a perfect approach for the COVID-19 response where you have a lot of potential partners and may often need to work through awards that are already in place. 

These are not just fledgling partners that are only starting up in development. Many of these are partners that have well-established operations, they have significant private development assistance, and they have the ability to scale operations in response to a crisis like this.

We saw that in the Ebola response in 2014 where a lot of partners who had no relationship with USAID, or perhaps with any institutional donor, stepped up and played among the most significant roles in the response to the Ebola crisis, where scaling up education about hand washing and burials, while remaining sensitive to local customs and culture, was essential to controlling its spread. Those were the make-or-break interventions and it was not typically existing USAID partners that had enough presence or staying power or access to local communities to scale up those kinds of operations. Rather it was the kinds of groups that work on private assistance and have long-term commitments and that really can't be bothered usually to work with institutional donors.

Q: Do you believe the initiative is already seeing significant results in this first year?

A: We have fundamentally changed the way USAID measures success on local partner engagement. For the past decade, that success metric was how much USAID funding is given to local partners directly. Now it’s about measuring the local partners’ performance in achieving development outcomes and USAID programs’ strengthening those local partners’ capacity. And that's pretty significant that USAID missions will now be reporting this year and in the years ahead on that metric, not just for NPI awards but for all programs in all sectors.