NPI Celebrates First Year of Innovative Development

A year ago, USAID said we can do even better. 

That’s exactly what it did when it created the New Partnerships Initiative (NPI), revolutionizing the way the Agency does business to generate more partner participation and multiply its impact under an umbrella creed of building sustainability and self-reliance. 

The idea was to jump-start worldwide development through a streamlined and more inclusive awards process. 

"NPI has set us up for success in tackling the development challenges ahead," wrote Acting Administrator John Barsa on the eve of the first anniversary. And, he adds, as the Agency works to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, “Forging new and different partnerships with non-traditional organizations is essential to creating innovative and scalable solutions to end this crisis.  NPI has never been more pertinent to achieving our priorities at USAID."

Thus far, 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.

"Winning a USAID award takes a compelling need, innovative solutions, and sufficient resources to address the issue," said Randall Tift, USAID Chief Acquisition and Assistance Policy Officer.

"These are challenging times, but the process shouldn't be daunting," he added.

NPI has created more avenues and opportunities—an express lane so to speak—for innovative ideas that advance USAID's mission of saving and improving the lives of people everywhere.

With 14 Missions having submitted NPI action plans anticipating dozens of projects, the feedback has helped the Agency provide more explicit guidance on how to set strategic goals and work with new and underutilized partners, wrote Barsa.

"In addition, nearly 70 Missions have set targets for the Agency's new global capacity-strengthening metric as part of the action plans," Barsa added. "These new targets will establish our approach to measuring the performance of local partners by expanding our definition of success beyond just a percentage of money spent."

In every instance, the goal is to follow a path of self-reliance for the communities and local partners involved, such that they will be stabilizing influences long after the program ends. 

This is exemplified by the first NPI awards totaling $4 million that went to six local groups in Northern Iraq to help religious and ethnic minorities who were targets of brutality by ISIS.

In addition, Samaritan's Purse was awarded $9 million as a part of a new $18 million award to the International Organization for Migration to support the return and recovery of displaced religious and ethnic minority communities in the Nineveh Plains and Western Nineveh Province of Iraq.

The Iraq initiative is a prime example of the flexibility built into the NPI concept to address a pressing need, said Tift.

In a short time, the Agency brought together both community-based and established partners to leverage local knowledge with private development experience in a real-time demonstration of how the model could work.

Coming together in this one exercise were the key NPI elements of partner expansion, local partner recruitment, concept development, co-creation of strategy, and capacity building of organizations.

"The awards were made in record time," said Tift. "It demonstrated we could do it, and that was a great example of overcoming obstacles and utilizing virtually all of the strengths of the New Partnerships Initiative program.”

In late April, Acting Administrator Barsa announced a second stage of NPI action plans, following the earlier pilot phase. The action plans will provide the blueprint to put NPI into practice across the entire spectrum of the Agency's work.

"I ask all Missions to engage in this exercise with ambition and creativity; take advantage of the current [COVID-19] crisis to think differently and embrace innovation," Barsa wrote.

The New Partnerships Initiative embraces “thinking differently,” realizing new ideas represent the valued currency of now and of the future if USAID is to meet and solve development challenges the world over.