Reflections on a USAID Development Journey #2: Is five years enough?

Introduction to these informal notes

On Halloween 2022, I retired from working with USAID after almost 40 years, as a technical officer, a Project Design Officer and supporting the Agency in what was the former Bureau of Policy and Program Coordination (PPC) and then the Bureau for Policy, Planning, and Learning (PPL).  I also had a lot of fun working on renewable energy programs as well as Natural Resource Management (NRM) policy programs throughout Africa, as well as part of the reengineering team developing the Agency’s programming guidance and co-designed the Results Framework.  I also had a  lot  of work on training, knowledge management and a wide range of other things.  

One of my most fun jobs over the last several years has been working with a number of the PPL Communities of Practice (COPs), including the Collaborating, Learning, and Adapting COP and the Program Cycle Implementation COP, which are internal knowledge sharing spaces for USAID staff.  I decided to leave by summarizing some of my thoughts over the…decades, through a series of posts. Here are the posts, with just some irrelevant timing logistics deleted and grammar and typos corrected, as well as reducing the level of USAID-centric situations and acronyms. 

Please remember that they are informal posts, and represent my personal perspective, and do not represent USAID policy.

Reflections on a USAID Development Journey #2: Is five years enough?  

A bit more on the topic we've covered before - the time needed to achieve a development result.

There has been considerable debate recently about the length of time of  mechanisms and projects, saying that five years is not enough, given the amount of time to select contractors, field a team and start work. I'd agree with that; sometimes planners sort of assume that life starts in the field like switching on a light, and there are some donors which have experimented with 10-15 year-long contracts, but I would respectfully suggest this misses the point.  

Again, sometimes we draft the descriptions as if a problem shows up literally at a standing start, doesn't build on anything before it, and ends up with a bow and champagne at the end. If only life came in five-year increments. Reminds me of the example from USAID/Uganda a few years ago which had a 15-year goal achieved in 5-year increments, which of course is how large infrastructure programs in the U.S. (the Chesapeake Bridge, or redesigning a health care system) probably would best be visualized. Not sure why we don't have a longer-term horizon even if funding needs to be "chunked." 

Many years ago (decades ago...) in the Africa Bureau, we used to have many massive cooperative agreements (CA) supporting the development of national agricultural research programs (under something called Title XII), which often included a CA with a U.S. land grant university, supporting both training staff as well as working with the national entity to carry out research. One of the most interesting programs was in Rwanda, where the Mission Director designed it around two, five-year CAs: the first about training and building the infrastructure, and the second about the actual research. It made no sense to try to do them simultaneously. So, for each 5-year CA, there were performance indicators related to the investments in those 2 segments, but of course the second could not succeed if the first was not able to develop a cadre of Rwandan researchers. 

I am not suggesting that anyone can or should give USAID those types of guarantees in terms of programs for everything, but rather keeping the longer view is probably useful, in part to ensure that we understand which piece of the much larger, and longer-term puzzle we have in our hand.

What drives all of this, as mentioned in an earlier email, is to have a sense of the longer term, if you will, a 10-15 year vision and development hypothesis.  When I have raised this earlier, I usually heard that this isn't rigorous enough, that we can't predict and budget with that level of uncertainty. Being a contrarian, I'd gently say that we do this all the time.

The U.S. developed a federal strategy in the late 1950s for addressing the isolation of the Appalachian states by addressing a weakness of the federal interstate highway system, through building new highways through West Virginia and points south. It was based on a well-considered hypothesis (and a Results Framework, if such a thing existed then) that this lack of access fundamentally limited access to markets, skills and consumer goods.

That strategy had a very rough budget, but it essentially served as a long-term vision around which, for decades, contracts and subcontracts were issued in order to get specific sections of the various highway sections completed. While there were very rigorous systems in place for managing those contracts, with very rigorous monitoring systems, the overall logic - why exactly are we doing these roads - could be examined. And not through performance measures, but instead through a comprehensive assessment of the underlying logic in the theory of change (TOC).  

And when they DID get back to it, literally 60 years or so later, the most recent study concluded that the roads were indeed well-built, and a partial solution, but probably not the fundamental reason for lagging economic growth. But this is not the fault in planning, or in tracking performance indicators, the problem was with some of the underlying assumptions driving the TOC, which only became clear over time.

I think the conclusion was: they should have asked key analytic questions about the TOC, maybe at least every ten years?  I find we are so wrapped up in performance indicators that we often don’t ask the foundational question - was the underlying logic in fact correct? What have we learned over time, not about our funds but the problem itself?