By Foster Obi
U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has announced five new awards in global health, higher education, youth, and women’s economic empowerment under the New Partnerships Initiative (NPI).
A Statement signed by USAID Acting Administrator John Barsa, said that these awards, which total $95 million, demonstrate USAID’s priority of working with new, underutilized, and local organizations, which are best-suited to empower and equip their communities on the Journey to Self-Reliance. These diverse NPI programs all take a “mentoring” approach, through which the prime partners will sub-award the majority of the funding to new, underutilized, and local partners to achieve measurable development outcomes.
Barsa noted, “I am proud of our Agency and these new NPI awardees for working with us to co-create potentially transformative partnerships. USAID is diversifying our partner base and changing how we make awards to elevate local leadership and drive new solutions to development challenges.
Global Health: USAID issued a three-year, $15 million award to the Africa Christian Health Associations Platform (ACHAP) (link is external), a first-time USAID prime partner. ACHAP will implement evidence-based and locally owned community health interventions designed to reduce maternal and child mortality and morbidity in the Republics of Kenya and Uganda.
“This NPI activity will improve targeted outcomes in maternal, newborn, and child health and voluntary and informed family planning, while simultaneously building local technical and organizational capacity to sustain these results in support of each community’s Journey to Self-Reliance. Sub-recipients, including the Christian Health Association of Kenya and the Uganda Catholic Medical Bureau, will implement activities on the ground in those two countries.
International Education: USAID awarded a program titled, “Supporting Holistic and Actionable Research in Education” (SHARE) to the Pulte Institute for Global Development at the University of Notre Dame (UND) (link is external) in the amount of $40 million. SHARE will improve education and learning outcomes by strengthening national capacity to generate, translate, and use the high-quality data and evidence needed to inform education policy and programmatic decisions. Issued under the Higher Education for Leadership, Innovation, and Exchange (HELIX) Annual Program Statement, this NPI activity will work with local and locally established higher-education institutions and research networks through a mentorship approach in the regions of Africa and Latin America, as well as in other countries such as the Kingdom of Cambodia.
Empowering Youth: USAID is pleased to announce “Youth Excel” a five-year, $30 million NPI award to International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) (link is external), with ten planned sub-awards to youth-led organizations (YLOs) and youth-serving organizations (YSOs), of which half are local organizations, under the YouthPower 2 (YP2) Annual Program Statement (link is external).
“ Through these grants, local YLOs and YSOs will customize the design of implementation-research initiatives in education, employment, health, and governance that respond directly to local programmatic and policy needs.
Women’s Global Development and Prosperity (W-GDP) Initiative
In partnership with the White House-led Women’s Global Development and Prosperity (W-GDP) Initiative, USAID’s NPI has awarded $7.5 million to the Rainforest Alliance (link is external) and $2.5 million to The Asia Foundation (link is external), which together will make nine sub-awards to new or underutilized local partners.
“The awards promote economic empowerment for at-risk and marginalized women, including survivors of trafficking and women affected by conflict, in the Republic of The Philippines (The Asia Foundation’s W-GDP NPI Philippines award); and the Republics of Guatemala and Honduras and the United Mexican States (the Rainforest Alliance’s W-GDP NPI Latin America award). Activities under these awards will focus on developing and providing workforce and vocational training for women and innovative financial tools to allow them to gain access to capital, with the goal of increasing the economic power and income of women as employees and entrepreneurs. The W-GDP NPI Latin America award also will help women to obtain higher-paid jobs at later stages in supply-chains. The W-GDP NPI Philippines award will promote in-person and digital connectivity to support women entrepreneurs’ access to information, markets, and opportunities.”
About the W-GDP Initiative: In February 2019, the White House established the W-GDP Initiative, the first-ever, whole-of-Government approach to global women’s economic empowerment. W-GDP seeks to reach 50 million women in the developing world by 2025 by focusing on three pillars: (1) Women Prospering in the Workforce; (2) Women Succeeding as Entrepreneurs; and, (3) Women Enabled in the Economy. W-GDP leverages a new innovative fund at USAID that seeks to scale private-public partnerships that address the three pillars. In its first year alone, W-GDP programs reached 12 million women across the globe.
