hi, USAID’s New Partnerships Initiative (NPI) is making it easier for partners to bring good ideas to the Agency by lowering barriers to entry. It also is targeting co-creation as a way to build stronger mutual partnerships from the outset and speed up the award process. Now an Agency priority goal, co-creation brings together a variety of stakeholders—such as local governments, donors, civil society, private-sector companies, and faith-based organizations—to build solutions to development challenges. It has proven successful in regions and projects around the globe.

When you think of USAID’s brand, you might just think of its logo. But USAID’s brand is more than just its official seal, its name, and its tagline “From the American People.” USAID’s brand represents what the Agency stands for: the goodwill of the American people and their commitment to partnership.

USAID's Grand Challenges for Development are an exciting way for new and nontraditional partners to engage with the Agency and contribute to solving pressing and complex development problems. The USAID-supported Water and Energy for Food Grand Challenge is reaching out to innovators in the private sector and forming beneficial partnerships through its regional innovation hubs. Read more in an excerpt from the article below, originally posted on Agrilinks.

Identifying, interviewing, hiring, and onboarding the right candidate is always challenging—especially when an organization is up against a tight deadline. When a key USAID implementing partner in the Dominican Republic faced the need to rapidly hire a permanent Chief of Party (COP), USAID’s Mission in the Dominican Republic tapped the resources of the Partnerships Incubator to deliver the training, technology, coaching, and mentoring required for the partner to successfully recruit and hire their next COP within a tight three-week timeframe.

View the recording and slide deck from the January 25 "Lessons Learned from USAID New and Local Partnerships" webinar. In January 2021, the USAID Office of Acquisition and Assistance (M/OAA) launched a stocktaking review of the 2018 Acquisition & Assistance Strategy (A&A Strategy). As a part of that stocktaking review, a number of case studies were developed from awards managed by various parts of the Agency.

With its dramatic, peaked mountains and palm-lined shores, Saint Lucia—a small island in the Caribbean—attracts more than 1 million tourists every year to vacation on its picture-perfect beaches. Despite the strength of its tourism sector, overall unemployment in Saint Lucia is high at around 17 percent in 2020, and youth unemployment stands at 36 percent, according to the World Bank. To address this challenge and better prepare youth for the modern-day workforce, the government of Saint Lucia teamed up with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID); World Education, Inc.; and subawardees Sir Arthur Lewis Community College and Tuskegee University, a historically Black university based in Alabama, to ask youth how they should solve it.

The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) is continuing a public campaign to share an important change that will occur in April 2022 and will affect federal awardees of all kinds. At a session on January 12, a repeat of a previous session in November 2021, GSA representatives described the background of the shift and provided information for stakeholders.

Please join USAID’s Office of Acquisition and Assistance (M/OAA) and the Local, Faith, and Transformative Partnerships Hub (DDI/LFT) for a learning event on Tuesday, January 25, at 8:00 a.m. Eastern Time. In this event, representatives from USAID Missions and implementing partners will share lessons learned from working with new and local partners, and how these experiences will inform future localization efforts and acquisition and assistance approaches at USAID.