Rebuilding Policy Capacity

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If USAID is to become the world’s premier development agency, it must be able to make strategic policy choices that are informed by cutting-edge evidence and analysis.  To guide us in that effort, we have created a new Bureau of Policy, Planning and Learning (PPL).  The Bureau will produce bold, evidence-based policies and strategies to help us leverage our relationships with other donors, mobilize innovation in science and technology, and reintroduce a culture of research, knowledge-sharing, and evaluation.

GOAL

To ensure that USAID again becomes an evidence-based, results-oriented, learning organization. 
 
OBJECTIVES

1. Help ensure policy coherence across the Agency’s operating units, within the inter-agency, and with other donors and external actors.
    
2. Help produce and disseminate high-quality development policies and strategies, with an initial focus on education, global climate change, evaluation, and countering violent extremism and counterinsurgency (CVE/COIN).  The Bureau will also take the lead in developing a comprehensive strategic agenda for the Agency and lead the implementation of the President’s Policy Directive on Global Development.
    
3. Provide the strategic basis for country-level budget allocation and programming decisions, linked to identification of priority development challenges and results.
    
4. Streamline and reduce planning and reporting burdens  to enable our staff to spend more time thinking and acting strategically, designing and evaluating projects while working more closely with our host country and other development partners.
    
5. Reestablish through project design a rigorous, analytically based approach to achievement of results targeted in country-level strategic planning.
    
6. Foster a culture of learning through research, learning from experience, gathering and analyzing data, and sharing knowledge, and subjecting our work to high standards of monitoring and evaluation.
    
7. Mobilize and foster innovation in science and technology with direct application to key development challenges.
    
8. Reach out and collaborate more intensively with traditional and emerging development partners, including diaspora networks, social entrepreneurs, and non-traditional donors.

APPROACH

1. Serve as the USAID’s focal point for implementing strategy and policy recommendations emerging from the President’s Policy Directive on Global Development and the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review processes. 
    
2. Create and chair Policy Task Teams—small groups of Agency experts—to help develop Agency-wide policies and strategies in the areas of evaluation, education, global climate change, and countering violent extremism and counterinsurgency (CVE/COIN).
    
3. By June 2011, revitalize project design through development of new advanced project design training, issuance of new project design guidance, creation of a Community of Practice (CoP) to offer project design resources and continual learning for practitioners, and establishment of a Project Design Assistance Corps to support Mission design efforts.
    
4. By July 2011, develop Country Development Cooperation Strategies (CDCS) for missions that cumulatively comprise approximately 40 percent the Agency’s budget (excluding crisis countries such as Afghanistan and Pakistan);
    
5. Co-lead with the State Department an effort to streamline and reduce unnecessary planning and reporting requirements.
    
6. Build partnerships within the federal government and with non-governmental partners to help disseminate technical knowledge and promote innovation in science and technology to help address development challenges. 
    
7. Ensure that development is prominently featured at events surrounding the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) through active participation by the USAID Administrator.
    
8. Secure the election of J. Brian Atwood for the position of OECD-DAC chair.