Looking Over the Horizon: Adapting to a World Altered by COVID-19
By Acting USAID Administrator John Barsa
With over 41 million cases and 1.1 million deaths worldwide, there is no doubt that COVID-19 is one of the most acute global health crises in modern history.
Here at USAID, however, we know that COVID-19 is more than a health crisis; it is a national security, development, and humanitarian crisis, too. And the impacts of the virus won’t end with the vaccine. People around the globe will be faced with tackling the secondary and tertiary impacts of this pandemic for years to come.
But what does that mean in reality? It means helping the nearly 1 billion children who have been negatively affected by school closures due to COVID-19. It means making sure that the 117 million children who are at risk of missing a measles vaccine get the preventative treatment they need. And it means helping to restore the global economy, where developing country growth projections look dire, and foreign direct investment is expected to plunge by $620 billion.
USAID is committed to addressing evolving national security challenges while helping our partner countries rebuild and recover from the impacts of COVID-19 in order to continue on their Journeys to Self-Reliance. To do this well, however, we had to take a hard look at our policies, our programming, and our budget, and ask ourselves: What will COVID-19 mean for our world and our work? How can we look over the horizon and proactively respond to the demands of a substantially changed global context?
To help answer this question, I commissioned an internal team of experts to review how we do business, and to make recommendations on how USAID can better support our partner countries as they tackle these new and unexpected challenges.
The Review Process
The review, which we call Over the Horizon, began with a rigorous data-driven and evidence-based analysis of the impacts of COVID-19. From this, USAID identified five emerging trends and key takeaways. Then, drawing on over 200 data sources and the participation of 75 subject matter experts, the team designed over 30 best-case and worst-case scenarios as a result of the pandemic.
This served as the analytical foundation for our Over the Horizon review, and from it, we identified three strategic objectives to anchor how we plan to focus our work:
- Building resilience in countries that are increasingly fragile due to COVID-19.
- Responding to dramatic increases in food insecurity, poverty, and loss of educational opportunities in communities most impacted by COVID-19.
- Strengthening public and private health systems strained by COVID-19 in partner countries critical to global health security.
USAID used these three objectives to frame subsequent conversations with our staff and partners. We also used them to survey the field, and as ways to frame roundtables with representatives from 74 organizations.
Tatenda Macheka, WFP
Final Recommendations
Everything we learned — from analyses, subject matter experts, and host country governments — went into shaping a set of final recommendations that, when implemented, will help USAID more flexibly adapt to the needs and conditions of a world altered by COVID-19.
For example, USAID will establish a strategic foresight unit in our Washington, D.C. headquarters to prepare for the pandemic’s unexpected impacts, and to keep us looking ahead to the next crisis.
We will also make immediate, meaningful changes that allow more of USAID’s Foreign Service Nationals (FSNs) — local, non-U.S. citizens employed in USAID Missions — to be in positions of leadership, especially in technical offices where they possess deep subject matter expertise. During COVID-19, the enhanced authorities we provided to such FSNs were critical elements in ensuring the success of our work. Making this shift is essential to USAID’s success at all times, but is even more so when faced with a crisis that may cause drawdowns of American staff.
We also have a series of recommendations for each of our three strategic objectives. USAID will prioritize implementing these recommendations in Over the Horizon focus countries, places hit hard by COVID-19 with the potential for backsliding on development. They are also places of national security importance. USAID developed its Over the Horizon focus country list in the same data-driven, consultative manner as I described earlier, and will make adjustments as global and regional conditions change.
What’s Next?
Our goal is always to support our partner countries on their Journey to Self-Reliance, and, in this case, that means adapting how we work. Now that we have recommendations for a new way forward, we are moving to the operationalization phase — implementing the recommendations in focus countries. We will collaborate internally with USAID staff around the world, and seek input from host-country governments and other partners, as we develop detailed implementation plans.
I am confident that following through on these recommendations will make USAID more responsive and better-prepared as we navigate new environments and look over the horizon to a world altered by COVID-19.
About the Author
John Barsa is the Acting Administrator of USAID. Follow him @JBarsaUSAID. Learn more about USAID’s humanitarian responses, and follow USAID’s humanitarian efforts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
