Nearly 800 million people across the globe will go to bed hungry tonight, most of them smallholder farmers who depend on agriculture to make a living and feed their families. Despite an explosion in the growth of urban slums over the last decade, nearly 75 percent of poor people in developing countries live in rural areas. That’s why growth in the agriculture sector has been found, on average, to be at least twice as effective in reducing poverty as growth in other sectors.
Investing in these smallholder farmers—most of whom are women—is more important than ever. A spike in world food prices in 2008 hurt economies across the world and led to destabilizing riots in over 30 countries. In order to feed a population expected to grow to 9 billion people by 2050, the world will have to double its current food production, all while climate change increases droughts and leads to less predictable rains.
In 2009 at the G-8 Summit in L’Aquila, Italy, the United States rallied global leaders to refocus on addressing the root causes of global food insecurity through agricultural development and nutrition. This set the foundation for the U.S. Government’s global hunger and food security initiative, Feed the Future, which is the U.S. contribution to this global effort to combat global hunger, poverty, and malnutrition.
Feed the Future is also the primary way the U.S. Government contributes to another global effort on food security: The New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition Launched in 2012, the New Alliance brings partners together to unlock responsible private investment in African agriculture to benefit smallholder farmers and reduce hunger and poverty.
In line with the foundational principles of Feed the Future, the New Alliance supports country-driven approaches to development with input and collaboration from local organizations and leaders to ensure lasting results for smallholder farmers and their families. In 2016, enactment of the Global Food Security Act solidified the U.S. Government’s continued, bipartisan commitment to reducing hunger, malnutrition and poverty around the world. As part of these efforts, USAID is scaling up a comprehensive approach to fighting hunger and strengthening food security by:
As a result of these efforts, we will reduce the prevalence of poverty and the prevalence of stunted children under five years of age by an average of 20 percent in the areas where we work over five years.(22)
The U.S. Global Development Lab
Working collaboratively with the Agency and our external partners, the Lab's mission is two-fold:
If we are going achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 and end extreme poverty as we know it, we need to bring together diverse partners to catalyze the next generation of breakthrough innovations. That is why USAID established the Lab in 2014. The Lab operates under a set of guiding principles. We are:
Our focus on leveraging the promise of science, technology, innovation, and partnership reflects USAID’s broad embrace of innovation to bring about positive change and solve some of the world’s most pressing challenges. We are aligned around five core objectives to increase the impact of our efforts.
Education is Transformational
Education serves as a driver for development and the elimination of extreme poverty. Education is transformational for individuals and societies--it creates pathways to better health, economic growth, a sustainable environment, and peaceful, democratic societies. A person’s earnings increase by 10 percent with each year of school they complete. Women with higher levels of education have healthier children. And increasing the average level of higher education in a country by just one year can add half a percentage point of growth to GDP.
Despite unprecedented increases in school enrollment over the last decade, there is still a global learning crisis—worldwide, 250 million children are not acquiring basic literacy and numeracy skills, 130 million of whom have attended at least four years of school. 121 million children are not in school, and the number of out-of-school children living in crisis and conflict-affected countries is growing. Some 114 million youth aged 15 to 24 cannot read or write a simple sentence; nearly two thirds are women. From 2011-2015, USAID has supported 151 basic education programs in 45 countries, directly benefiting more than 41.6 million children and youth.
Globally, girls are especially disadvantaged--right now, 130 million girls are not in school worldwide, and millions more face barriers to staying in school. Yet we know that when girls are educated, their families are healthier, they have fewer children, they get married later, and they have more opportunities to generate income.
Females make up almost half of the children and youth who benefited from USAID’s basic education programming (20.2 million females and 21.4 million males). Resolving the global learning crisis--ensuring all children and youth are in school and learning-- requires political will at the highest levels and strong collaboration in the countries where we work. USAID partners with other U.S. government agencies, donors, country governments, multilateral agencies, civil society, and the private sector to ensure equitable access to inclusive, quality education for all – especially the most marginalized and vulnerable. We do this by working to achieve the goals of the USAID Education Strategy, including:
Learning, effectiveness, accountability, and transparency are central to the success of our strategy. To most effectively reach our goals, and the goals of our host country partners, USAID collaborates with partners globally to generate and use evidence as the basis for continuous learning and program improvement.
USAID accomplishments under the current Education Strategy (2011-2015) take many forms, including providing clarity on USAID priorities in education, concentrating investments at the global and country level, contributing to education service delivery in our partner countries, and establishing critical partnerships and collaborations that have advanced the goals of the strategy. From 2011-2015, USAID results include:
Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment
Around the world nearly 98 million girls are not in school. Globally, 1 in 3 women will experience gender-based violence in her lifetime. In the developing world, 1 in 7 girls is married before her 15th birthday, with some child brides as young as 8 or 9. Each year more than 287,000 women, 99 percent of them in developing countries, die from pregnancy- and childbirth-related complications.
While women make up more than 40 percent of the agriculture labor force only 3 to 20 percent are landholders. In Africa, women-owned enterprises make up as little as 10 percent of all businesses. In South Asia, that number is only 3 percent. And despite representing half the global population, women comprise less than 20 percent of the world's legislators.
Investing in gender equality and women’s empowerment can unlock human potential on a transformational scale. Women account for one-half of the potential human capital in any economy. More than half a billion women have joined the world’s work force over the past 30 years, and they make up 40 percent of the agriculture labor force. According to the World Bank, countries with greater gender equality are more prosperous and competitive.
An extra year of secondary school for girls can increase their future earnings by 10-20 percent. Girls with secondary schooling are up to 6 times less likely to marry as children than those with little or no education. And countries that invest in girls’ education have lower maternal and infant deaths, lower rates of HIV and AIDS, and better child nutrition.
When women participate in civil society and politics, governments are more open, democratic and responsive to citizens. When women are at the negotiating table, peace agreements are more inclusive and durable. And simply by empowering women farmers with the same access to land, new technologies and capital as men, we can increase crop yields by as much as 30 percent helping to feed a growing population.
At USAID, we believe that gender equality and women’s empowerment isn’t a part of development but the core of development. Progress cannot be delivered in a vacuum. For societies to thrive, women and girls must have access to education, healthcare, and technology. They must have control of resources, lands, and markets. And they must have equal rights and equal opportunities as breadwinners, peace-builders and leaders.
That’s why we have gender programs in more than 80 countries. In 2012, we released our Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Policy [PDF, 2.7 MB], cementing our commitment to supporting women and girls. Building on this critical foundation and decades of experience, we’re ensuring all our strategies and programs are shaped by a gender analysis, and establish metrics that measure the gender impact of our programs.
Through Feed the Future, we’re advancing policy changes that give women access to financial services and ownership of the very land they tend. One year after launching Saving Mothers, Giving Life(link is external) in Uganda and Zambia, the public-private partnership program has reduced maternal mortality by roughly a third. In Afghanistan, the Promoting Gender Equality in National Priority Programs (PROMOTE) Partnership is the largest investment we have ever made to advance women and girls in development.
This is only the beginning. As President Barack Obama said, “When women succeed, nations are more safe, more secure, and more prosperous.”(25)
Water and Sanitation
Water is essential to health and food production. Currently, nearly 800 million people lack dependable access to clean water and about 2.5 billion lack access to modern sanitation, putting them at risk of disease. Food production is the largest consumer of water, and also represents the largest unknown factor of future water use as the world population continues to increase. Global population growth projections of two to three billion people over the next 40 years, combined with changing diets, are expected to increase food demand 70 percent by 2050.
Our Water and Development Strategy steers USAID’s water programs toward key themes consistent with two of the most important ways we rely on water: water for health and water for food. It is our hope that improvements in WASH programs, and sound management and use of water for food security will save lives and advance development. That’s why we are committed to integrating a focus on water across our agriculture, health and climate work by:
We have a long history of delivering results:
Working in Crises and Conflict
Every year, droughts, floods, hurricanes, and other natural disasters affect approximately 100 million people and cause more than $100 billion dollars in economic damage. Today, nearly 53 million people worldwide are in need of emergency food aid. And authoritarian leaders still govern nearly 50 countries, while the same number of countries are affected by conflict or potential instability.
Poverty and conflict are inextricably linked to authoritarianism and poor governance, with the consequences for citizens only worsening during times of crisis. In 2016, conflict in South Sudan, Iraq, Yemen, and Ukraine left tens of millions in need of assistance while Syria entered the sixth year of a brutal civil war that has destroyed entire communities and affected far too many lives. Just as we have in these countries, USAID remains committed to responding to crises around the world, to help the people and places most in need. With a focus on disaster prevention, response, recovery and transition, we are working to:
Providing humanitarian assistance in times of need is the fundamental reflection of our core American values. Over the last year, we have:
Strategy and Planning
Strategic planning and policy improvement is a top priority at USAID. We've been taking our efforts to the next level as part of our internal reform strategy, USAID Forward. Our day-to-day activities are constantly informed and guided by this and other carefully crafted guidance frameworks:
All of our efforts are aimed at modernizing and strengthening USAID so that it can meet the most pressing development challenges and work more efficiently towards our ultimate goal—creating the conditions where our work is no longer needed.
Evidence-Based Approach: As a premier development agency, USAID must make strategic choices that are informed by experience and cutting-edge evidence and analysis.
The Program Cycle: The Program Cycle, codified in the Automated Directive Systems (ADS) 201 chapter, is USAID’s operational model for planning, delivering, assessing and adapting development programming in a given region or country in order to achieve more effective and sustainable results to advance U.S. foreign policy. The Bureau for Policy, Planning and Learning introduced the Program Cycle in 2011 as a framework to link together the fundamental components of the Agency’s programming:
USAID Program Cycle: The Program Cycle is USAID’s operational framework for achieving effective and sustainable results in the field. The Program Cycle Policy was revised in 2016 to fully integrate these components into a more complete and coherent business model. Together with ADS 200 on Development Policy, ADS 201 replaces ADS 200-203.
A Principles-Based Approach: The following principles are essential for good development and serve as the foundation for ADS 201. These principles also support successful implementation of the Program Cycle:
Country Development Cooperation Strategy: Strategic planning is the process to determine the best strategic approach in a given country or region. It is based on U.S. development policy priorities, country and/or regional priorities, and USAID’s comparative advantage and available foreign assistance resources, among other factors.
The strategic planning process results in a Country Development Cooperation Strategy (CDCS) that implements Agency policies and strategies, integrates U.S. Government assistance and Presidential initiatives, and sets the foundation for project design and evaluation.
Once approved, the CDCS informs assistance planning, budgeting and resource allocation. The CDCS relies on thorough analysis and division of labor to set and achieve ambitious goals and objectives in close collaboration with host governments and citizens.
Project Design: Project design is the process for defining how to achieve results to ensure that efforts are complementary and aligned in support of a strategy. Each project design typically incorporates multiple activities organized around, and implemented to achieve, a common purpose. The process also ensures that projects define a clear logic and purpose, are based on evidence of what works, and develops detailed plans for evaluation, monitoring and learning.
Budget Management: Annual budgeting involves reconciling and prioritizing many objectives and constraints at multiple levels. Given the fluidity of the process, CDCSs do not serve as final budgets. Instead they serve as directives over the annual budget process by rationalizing judgments of the relative value of assistance options within a country and region and across operating units.
Bureaus continue to play a key role in the budget formulation process, taking into consideration key country and functional priorities. During budget formulation and allocation, Regional and Sector Bureaus highlight the links between resources and results, and provide a brief analysis of the degree to which their recommendations align with approved CDCSs and projects. This information is used in budget reviews to try to maximize development results within budget constraints.
Evaluation: With the release of the Evaluation Policy in 2011, USAID made an ambitious commitment to quality program evaluation - the systematic collection and analysis of information as a basis for judgements to improve effectiveness and timed to inform decisions about current and future programming. USAID uses these program evaluation findings to inform decisions, improve program effectiveness, be accountable to stakeholders and support organizational learning.
Monitoring: Monitoring is the ongoing and systematic tracking of information relevant to USAID strategies, projects and activities to support adaptive management and accountability structures at the Agency. Monitoring tells us whether implementation is on track and whether results are being achieved.
Monitoring Plans for strategies, projects and activities guide the efforts of USAID staff and implementing partners to ensure relevant information is available when needed to make adjustments to programs as well as to report to stakeholders.
Collaborating, Learning and Adapting: Strategic collaboration, continuous learning and adaptive management link together all components of the Program Cycle. Sources for learning include data from monitoring, portfolio reviews, findings of research, evaluations, analyses conducted by USAID or third parties, knowledge gained from experience and other sources. These sources should be used to develop plans, implement projects, manage adaptively and contribute to USAID’s knowledge base in order to improve development outcomes. A Collaborating, Learning and Adapting(link is external) (CLA) focus helps ensure that programming is coordinated together, grounded in evidence and adjusted as necessary to remain relevant and effective throughout implementation.(28)