Reflections on a USAID Development Journey #3: Dealing with the conflict between time-limited focus and the long and broad view

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 #3: Dealing with the conflict between time-limited focus and the long and broad view

I thought I'd pick up on a couple of earlier threads, in part in response to some recent discussions I've had with another colleague in a mission on influencing systems-level change.

The basic idea: USAID as an operational donor works through our partners with funds from Congress. This model over time has evolved into the allocation of funds in 5-year timeframes (more or less), enabled by relatively short segments of incremental funding, primarily through contracts and grants. In order to prove we are using funds properly, and to make sure that the work is "contractible," we define the problem and its resolution around concrete products which can be counted and assessed. This then has affected how we allocate our staff and what we have them do, and why we have, quite correctly, so many CORs and AORs (contracting officer representatives and agreement officer representatives). It has also created a massive cottage industry to monitor, evaluate and learn from these interventions.

But, many development problems (or opportunities, to phrase it more positively) are not simply limited to 5-year increments and are not just resolvable by our own interventions. Sooo, how do you square the circle, so to speak?  For instance, how do we address local systems issues while our financial, planning and personnel cycles are both timed differently, and are designed to focus on specific, countable things, which we can state that our interventions led to?

In thinking of this, I was considering an analogy: the Google Meet's most recent function that allows you to fade the background so the person on screen is the only object that is in focus. This, in some ways, is like a specific intervention that we control; and the broader context behind and around the intervention is there but not really as important. As we work on systems, I would suspect that the blur behind the image will be bigger, and more important, if we are not careful.  

This also raises the question as to our role within USAID; clearly being a COR and AOR is critical for managing the image in focus, but who manages the larger image?  We usually call what is blurred as "context", but it often can be more than that; in fact, it can define the entire developmental point or our being in-country. It can be just as real, and probably more strategic, but outside of our manageable interest, to use a shopworn but still useful phrase. Is there another staff role which matters, and possibly another, broader theory of change which also needs to be elucidated?