PSC
Preserving Meaningful Changes from the Past Administration Certain initiatives developed by the previous administration under the leadership of former USAID Administrator Mark Green are worthy of consideration and continuance. A whole industry of books and articles has evolved around leadership: how to define it, how it relates to politics and how it impacts governance. Wise leadership recognizes that not everything that preceded it was bad. Certainly, any new team wants to put its mark on an agency, introducing new priorities, themes, and modus operandi—testing its own ideas and advancing its priorities. And certainly, the Biden administration and the new USAID Administrator Samantha Power plan to do so and should, taking over from a White House that expressed little support for foreign aid. Recognizing and prioritizing the critical needs of other nations to
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acquire vaccines against the COVID virus in the short term and helping them to develop policies to fight climate change in the long term are just two obvious examples that the Biden Administration has already begun to implement. However, certain initiatives under the leadership of former USAID Administrator Mark Green are worthy of consideration and continuance. The first initiative was set forth in the USAID Policy Framework: Ending the Need for Foreign Assistance and became known as the Journey to Self-Reliance. It emphasized the creation of a long-term goal for USAID, building
towards a time when foreign aid to developing nations would no longer be necessary. To accomplish this, USAID moved to place a premium on localization— taking steps to extend USAID programming to strengthen local institutions’ own capability to provide the services and programming that the United States and other donors currently provide. Although this has long been an objective of USAID programming, “Localization” seeks new and creative ways to strengthen these local institutions—the for-profit private sector, NGOs, and government—to reach self-sufficiency and function effectively together.
