USAID and Georgia – a Strong Partnership Winning the Fight Against COVID-19

Countries around the world currently need all the support they can get to combat the debilitating effects of COVID-19. Georgia is also affected by the COVID-19 pandemic but has received tremendous support from both local and international organizations. Among them is the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an organization whose support is remarkable in Georgia’s fight against COVID-19.

In this interview, Diplomat spoke with Peter A. Wiebler, USAID Mission Director in Georgia to understand USAID’s role in Georgia’s active fight against COVID-19, and what the future holds for their partnership with Georgia across several sectors.

USAID is helping Georgia weather the COVID-19 crisis; what kind of assistance is it providing?

The pandemic has presented a new and difficult challenge for both of our countries, but we’ve found innovative ways to deepen our partnership. Since the pandemic began, USAID has provided new assistance for infection prevention, identification and clinical management of cases, supporting laboratories and hospitals, and increasing communication about public health risks. We are partnering with the International Federation of Red Cross and the Georgia Red Cross Society so volunteers on the ground can provide food, hygiene supplies, and psychological support to thousands of Georgian households. This is part of $2.7 million in new emergency health assistance the U.S. Government has committed to Georgia since March.

In addition to this new assistance, 17 existing USAID programs have redirected resources toward the response. This rapid response covers many areas: supporting the economic recovery, helping Georgia’s courts continue to function during the pandemic, ensuring that people in vulnerable communities have accurate public health information, collaborating with Georgia’s Ministry of Education to develop more advanced distance learning tools, and much more. Our civil society partners make a lot of this work possible.

USAID’s pandemic response exemplifies our approach to partnering with Georgia. Georgia is not a passive recipient of assistance; it is a strategic partner of the United States. We collaborate to jointly identify objectives, design programs, and mobilize resources. This makes our assistance much more effective, and it ensures that our Georgian counterparts have ownership over their development efforts. We also have strong partnerships with the private and non-governmental sectors – including civil society, private businesses and business associations, and independent media.

How do you assess Georgia’s efforts to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic? What challenges do you recognize that remain?

Georgia’s response speaks for itself. The Georgian authorities and the Georgian people, working together, have done a great job of managing this crisis and reducing the spread of COVID-19. While it is too early to declare complete success, the fact that Georgia is starting to re-open earlier than many other countries tells us how effective those efforts have been. This truly has been a whole-of-society response, with the Government of Georgia, medical professionals, civil society, the private sector, and citizens all doing their part.

We are really pleased to see Georgia’s public health system manage this crisis so capably. This is due to domestic efforts, but it also reflects the support Georgia has received from its international friends, including the United States. Over the past two decades, USAID partnered with Georgia to help build a high-quality national healthcare system. We see the fruits of that partnership today, and it speaks to how USAID assistance works. We help our partners build the capacity to plan, finance, and implement their own solutions to development challenges, such as COVID-19.

How do you think Georgia will overcome this crisis and its harsh impacts on the economy?

Similar to many other countries around the world, COVID-19 has hit Georgia’s economy hard. We know this has caused hardship for Georgian families, but businesses are now starting to reopen due to the great job Georgia has done responding to COVID. USAID is supporting the economic recovery through partnerships with the Government of Georgia, the private sector, and business associations. Our objective is simple: we want to empower the private sector to get Georgia back on its feet and, moving forward, build a growing, inclusive economy that delivers for all Georgian families and communities.

The post-COVID economy will look different from what we had before. There will be new opportunities to use digital technologies and find new markets and customers, both here and abroad. Our assistance is helping small and medium-sized enterprises make the most of those opportunities. Agriculture is obviously a priority, given the large number of Georgians employed in the sector and the importance of food security to everyone’s well-being. Our goal is to help this sector meet the needs of Georgian consumers, to branch out and reach lucrative export markets, including in the European Union, and to create better-paying jobs for workers in this country. We recently launched a new program to help potato producers increase the quality and quantity of their harvests, creating new jobs and reducing Georgia’s dependence on imported food.

It will clearly take some time for Georgia’s economy, and indeed the global economy, to recover. We see great potential for Georgia to come back even stronger after the pandemic – perhaps even opportunities to “leapfrog” over longstanding development challenges – and Georgians should know that USAID is here to support.

Does USAID plan any new programs in Georgia? Or does the threat of COVID-19 affect its plans over the coming period?

COVID-19 is not slowing down our work. Quite the opposite, in fact. As I mentioned, we’ve recently launched new programs to help Georgia build its agriculture and education sectors, and to promote fact-based policymaking that can enable economic growth and attract foreign direct investment. We also have programs that are about to come online or are currently in development. Here are some examples.

This week, we launched a new program implemented by the McLain Association for Children to help persons with disabilities live more independently and be more active in Georgian society. We will work with local governments bodies to increase their capacity to provide services to persons with disabilities in a sustainable way. This reflects USAID’s focus on empowering all of Georgia’s citizens to participate in the country’s development – democratic, social, and economic.

We are also developing a new program to help Georgian society build “information integrity,” or resilience against disinformation. The COVID-19 pandemic is yet another reminder of how dangerous disinformation can be. While this program is still being developed, our goal is to partner with Georgia’s civil society and independent media to ensure that people have access to fact-based reporting and the ability to spot and call out disinformation when they see it.

Looking ahead, we will shortly announce a new, five-year strategy to guide our enduring partnership with Georgia. Under this strategy, we will change the way we partner with the Government of Georgia, expand our engagement with Georgia’s innovative private sector, strengthen our support for civil society and independent media, and continue to place Georgia’s citizens firmly at the center of our development efforts. You’ll hear more about this soon.

USAID mainly works in partnership with the government. Do you consider cooperating with the private sector, as there are many companies who have their own strategies and vision on how to contain and combat COVID-19?

We have worked in close partnership with the current government, as we have with previous governments as well to advance Georgia’s development. But we do not work mainly with the government. We have worked hard to cultivate strong partnerships with the private sector, civil society, and independent media in Georgia. The private sector is a particular area of focus for us now: we work directly with businesses and business associations to promote enterprise-led development. In fact, one of USAID’s guiding principles is that any country’s development depends on the private sector developing to the point where it delivers for workers, families, and communities – reducing and ultimately ending the need for foreign assistance. That’s why so much of our work focuses on creating an environment where the private sector can thrive and where foreign companies see that investing in Georgia is a smart decision. Georgia has already made great progress in that direction. We’re committed to staying here to scale up those efforts.

On the COVID-19 front, we are working with companies that are involved in the response. Through our partnership with Enterprise Georgia, we engaged local manufacturers to produce packaging for medical masks. With our support, these companies made it possible to deliver roughly 1 million masks to communities around the country, and we supported much-needed employment in the process. The Crystal Fund, implementer of USAID’s YES-Georgia program, organized an online hackathon to empower young entrepreneurs who are finding innovative ways to combat COVID. And as I mentioned earlier, we are helping Georgian companies reach more people through e-commerce.

These are just a few examples. All of them are important to Georgia’s recovery from COVID-19. They will also advance long-term economic growth and self-reliance in Georgia, which is exactly why USAID is sharpening its emphasis on partnering with the private sector.