Today, I announced three new funding opportunities as part of the New Partnerships Initiative (NPI) of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Agency's intent to develop NPI Action Plans at all of our Missions around the world.

The first NPI opportunity, the YouthPower 2 Youth Excel Addendum, will solicit new approaches that strengthen youth-led and youth-serving local and community-based organizations. The second, Higher Education for Leadership, Innovation, and Exchange, will support the Agency's goals in higher education by seeking solutions that create meaningful change, such as scholarships for individuals, capacity-building for local institutions, and policy reforms. Together, these two funding opportunities will result in awards worth at least $60 million focused on new and underutilized partners (defined as organizations that have received less than $25 million in direct and indirect awards from USAID over the last five years).

In addition, our Bureau for Global Health plans to issue an Addendum under its current NPI Annual Program Statement to respond to the pandemic of COVID-19 in the very near future.

I am committed to demonstrating that USAID is open for business in new ways. We are seeking to engage new partners that are effective development actors, who were previously limited or even blocked by complex solicitation requirements. At the same time, through NPI, we are looking to our more experienced partners to focus on mentoring and capacity-building to elevate the leadership of local organizations in the countries in which we work.

To support this initiative, all USAID Missions will develop NPI Action Plans. These new Action Plans will build on those drafted by the 14 Missions that participated in a pilot phase earlier this year, which identified and resulted in dozens of anticipated NPI projects across multiple sectors. NPI Action Plans will complement earlier work on Private-Sector Engagement Plans and continue to empower our field Missions to adapt our Agency-wide strategies to country contexts.

I am proud that our Missions have fully engaged in the U.S. Government's response to COVID-19, and that NPI is becoming a crucial part of that adaptation of our programmatic operations under these difficult conditions caused by the novel coronavirus. USAID is pursuing all options for an effective response, including by working with new or underutilized partners that can provide innovative, scalable solutions to address the pandemic.

Please visit our New Partnerships Initiative page for more information.