Message From The Director

Fiscal Year (FY) 2019 was another record breaking year for acquisition and assistance (A&A) obligations at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), with $17.2 billion. This exceeds obligations that have gone through A&A mechanisms in recent history. This record breaking year includes $784 million obligated to U.S. small businesses.

Beyond just the amount of obligations, it has been an unprecedented year for A&A at USAID. Wide ranging initiatives under Effective Partnering and Procurement Reform (EPPR) such as the launch of the Agency’s first-ever A&A Strategy, Category Management goals, the launch of the New Partnerships Initiative (NPI), the worldwide EPPR Summit and Workshop, and Award Management reforms have helped to strengthen our workforce, processes, operations, and relationships with our partners.

On December 10, 2018, Administrator Mark Green announced the Agency’s first-ever Acquisition and Assistance Strategy. The A&A Strategy outlines how the Agency will embrace the Journey to Self Reliance in its approaches to par tnering, by outlining five guiding principles to partnership. These guiding principles -- Diversifying the Partner Base; Changing How We Partner; Connecting Design, Procurement, and Implementation; Focusing on Value; and Enabling and Equipping the Workforce -- are meant to empower and equip our partners and staff to produce results-driven solutions that are responsive to our par tner countries. One of the first major deliverables of the A&A Strategy, was the NPI announcement on May 1, 2019. The goal of the NPI is to increase USAID’s development impact by elevating local leadership, fostering creativity and innovation, and mobilizing resources across the Agency’s programs. We are already seeing results from the fir st set of awards coming out of the NPI.

With EPPR, the Agency has begun to transform how its design to procurement to implementation process works. As part of EPPR, the Administrator recieved approximately 170 recommendations and approved 120 for implementation. This includes increased hiring of both Foreign Ser vice Officers and Civil Ser vice Contracting Officers, creating an institutional home for the Contracting/Agreement Officer Representative (C/AOR) function within the Bureau for Policy, Planning and Learning, the creation of the NPI, and removal of salary history from the Agency’s Biographical Data forms to ensure gender pay equity. During FY 2020, working across the Agency, we will be focused on implementing the remaining EPPR recommendations.

Looking ahead to FY 2020, there are a number of activities that we continue to work on, and other ongoing efforts that the Office of Acquistion and Assistance is monitoring. Some of these include finalizing the Automated Directives System (ADS) 303, guidance and techniques on phased procurements, expanding the guidance on Broad Agency Announcements (BAAs), and exploring how USAID can more effectively track subcontracts and subawards especially to local organizations within existing federal reporting.

The Agency has a lot of work ahead of us to continue to implement the guiding principles of the A&A Strategy, but I am confident that by working together we can achieve the goals we have set-out for ourselves.

Mark Walther
Director
Office of Acquisition and Assistance