United States Agency for International Development
Based out of USAID’s Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance (BHA), I work alongside several researchers and mentors from across the bureau to research how USAID can better finance local actors in international humanitarian action.
This project comes from an invaluable push to reimagine America’s role – not as a designer of fates but as an actor to empower local communities to pursue their own pathways to high standards of living and wellbeing.
The research project centred on exploring how USAID can redo its systems to add more meaningful local partnerships into the humanitarian projects they fund. Exit strategies (plans for the transitional phase when international actors leave projects) became the prime focus as they were the weakest area for many programs while also being an area of tremendous opportunity to increase sustainability of program benefits.
Research methodology ranged from assembling insights from interviews from staff within USAID and key stakeholder organizations, cleaning and analyzing funding application and decision data, and comparing takeaways from project success stories from humanitarian disasters across sub-Saharan Africa.
(Top Photo by Adam Jones, Global Photo Archive, Wiki Commons)