ARI ALEXANDER - USAID's SENIOR ADVISOR TO THE ADMINISTATOR, FOR NGO PARTNERSHIPS & GLOBAL ENGAGEMENT ON PROCUREMENT REFORM, STRAGEGIC PARTNERSHIPS AND ADMINISTRATOR SHAH'S VISION FOR THE AGENCY
EXCLUSIVE PHONE INTERVIEW PRIOR TO DEPARTURE TO GHANA
INTERVIEWER - FREDERICK NNOMA-ADDISON
Friday February 18, 2011
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT - 1:36pm EST
AMIP News - Good afternoon and welcome. This is a special interview with AMIP News. We have the opportunity of speaking with em USAID's Senior Advisor to the Administrator for NGO Partnerships and Global Engagement and former Deputy Director for the Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives in the Person of Ari Alexander, Ari Hello!
Ari Alexander (AA) - Hello Frederick how are you?
AMIP News - Very well thank you and thank you for joining me in the studios today.
AA - My pleasure to be here.
AMIP News - Right. Now just as a background it is my understanding that you have helped drive one of Administrator Shah's top priorities; reforming procurement policies in order to build more sustainable local capacity. In just a minute tell me about your story at USAID and your work over there just to give listeners and readers some background about who Ari Alexander is.
AA - Sure Frederick, thank you very much. Well I have the opportunity to work with a wonderful team here at USAID on procurement reform, one of the Administrator of USAID's top priorities and in simple terms what this means is the way that we do business, we've developed a reputation in recent years of being more friendly to very large companies that we award very large contracts to and this sends a message to a lot of people, that we are not open for business with smaller, newer partners, and what we are finding is that by prioritizing, changing some of our rules and regulations, some of the sheer volume of the paper work that it has required in the past to apply for funding to work with USAID, we are really trying to open the doors wider so that we are able to have a larger number of partners across the world with whom we partner to accomplish our development objectives.
And so there is a real emphasis here at USAID on getting back to the roots of great development which is most often done by local partners who are living and know best the communities in which they live and work and are really able to help lead us most successfully accomplish our projects. So the procurement reform effort has given us all a jolt of energy to prioritize, improving some of our business in that direction in the 82 missions around the world in which we work.
AMIP News - Sounds Great. Now when did this new direction come in, did it come with Administrator Shah's administration or what?
AA - That's right, administrator Shah begun his tenure here at USAID just a week before the terrible earth quake in Haiti eh, and after tending to that which was the largest disaster response in US government's history, and Administrator Shah was the lead for the US government in that response. He set about a very ambitious reform agenda that we call USAID Forward, and procurement reform is one of the pillars of that reform agenda that he's been speaking about for about 9 months, eh, high profile speeches both here in Washington and when he travels around the world. So there's a dedicated team working on procurement reform here through the General Counsel's office, our office of Acquisition and Assistance, and technical experts from throughout the agency just as there are teams working on all of the other objectives of the reform effort. So indeed we are about 1 year into the launch of this vision and very excited about the earlier results.
AMIP News - OK Sounds Good. Now USAID's work invariably is supposed to compliment or help the United States achieve it's foreign policy goals and I am reading here that your work involves partnerships with Faith Based Organizations. And the question is how do the two go together? How do you work with Faith Based Organizations to achieve US government’s foreign policy goals. Can you clarify that?
AA - Absolutely, so Faith Based Organizations are a subset of the partners with whom we work to accomplish our development objectives. As you know many of the organizations that do the best development work around the world are faith based in their orientation. Their motivation to do the work they do, their desire to help the world's poor, are very often eh housed in faith based structures, either networks of religious organizations that are national or international, or development specific organizations that have a common moral imperative to make the world a better place, to help the most vulnerable, to have many many partners around the world with whom we work. Some of those partners are Faith Based Organizations and partners and because of the establishment clause in the United States that guarantees a certain separation between church and state, there is some unique sensitivities and challenges around working with these partners in order to ensure that we maintain a very clear separation in caring for the tax payer dollars that we use to fund USAID projects around the world.
And so we have an office here to help organizations navigate that space in order to ensure that they are able to work with us as partners just like any other development partner, but so that they know that there is a very clear constitutional line to make sure that the tax payer dollars that are being spent are spent exclusively on achieving development objectives and are not mixed with inherently religious activities. Even if the motivations of some of the groups with whom we work are religious in nature, and so that's how our office functions in the larger structure here we tend to meet a lot of the groups with questions about how to navigate those waters and we help them do that since we have decades of experience of working with tremendous development organizations that are faith based in nature.
AMIP News - OK Sounds Good. If you are just listening I am speaking with eh USAID Senior Advisor to the Administrator for NGO, Partnerships and Global Engagement in the person of Ari Alexander, my name is eh Frederick Nnoma-Addison and this is AMIP News.
AMIP News - Uh now Mr. Alexander before I ask you a few questions about you upcoming trip to Ghana one question. How do you respond to development aid critics who say that aid is outdated and now we need to be talking about trade, what do you say?
AA - So we here at USAID follow the conversation happening on the global development community very closely and we have Administrator Shah, a real visionary and leader for the global development community. He has, some of you may know, worked at the Gates Foundation for many years, eh, prior to coming here and he brings a lot of his ideas and innovation and network from the private sector and the for profit world into his work as a leader in the US government and that enables us to think outside the box in much of our portfolio in a way that ensures that we are working most efficiently, that we are getting the best ideas from around the world and incorporating new methods to work most effectively to achieve our development objectives, so for example he's launched a development innovation venture in order to model a type of instrument for us modeled on the venture capital model which is been very successful in the private sector but is been less common in the development community.
What that means is that we can take more risk on innovative models and in development and expect that many of our funds will go towards projects that ultimately do not succeed, but that we can learn a lot from those experiences and that if one or two game changing innovations are funded and seeded by USAID it will be worth investing in dozens of others that are able to do so along the lines of the way that microenterprise or mobile banking has launched a taken off and changed the development world.
So we see a lot of room for innovation here, we see a lot of room for working more directly with local partners which is a direct response towards the critics of aid about the way money is spent on the overhead cost that we see in some of those larger organizations with whom we work. It’s more effective for us as an agency if we can find excellent, strong local partners, and that indeed is why we are committed to building the capacity of local organizations so that ultimately our purpose as a development agency is to get ourselves out of business and to ask for these skills and these investments for sustainable growth and in development into the countries themselves where we work, that's the long term vision of any development agency and we've shared that with many of our partners so that together in the decades to come we are able to see ourselves exit from a country and look back at a success story.
AMIP News - Sounds great, now USAID and Millennium Challenge Corporation, are you partners or competitors?
AA - So we have many many arms of the US government that work in concert here in Washington and around the world. So on any given day here in the nation's capital in the United States there are interagency meetings for senior officials from the Millennium Challenge Corporation from USAID, from OPEC, from the Department of Treasury, from the Department of State and Agriculture are all meeting each other in order to make sure that our strategies and programs are well coordinated. The same thing happens in the field, so in Ghana at any given time we have US government officials from many different agencies meeting together constantly and coordinating programs. So the Millennium Challenge Corporation has a very successful compact awarded in 2006 with Ghana, has been followed up just recently last month with a decision to award a second compact. We are very excited about that because the investment going into agriculture and investment going into infrastructure that is so central to the work we do in development over the long term so we are very much working together to achieve sustainable economic growth and we are excited to continue our robust relationship with our MCC partners in Ghana.
AMIP News - Sounds great, em, tell me when are you going to Ghana?
AA - I leave tomorrow night, I can't wait.
AMIP News - Oh my goodness! And how long are you gone?
AA - I will be there between Monday and Thursday, so I will arrive Sunday in the evening and I leave Thursday night, so I will have four days in the country.
AMIP News - And where in Ghana are you going to be, in Accra?
AA - Based in Accra and I am also going to be, going to be in a few other locations in the country and you will forgive my pronunciation, these places are new to me. I am going to be going to a site visit in Akorle in Akyem Sekyere and Gomoa Otambo.
AMIP News - You've done very well, don't worry.
AA - I am going to be going out of the capital in order to see some projects.
AMIP News - Now, what what what do you hope to accomplish on this trip, what are some of the things you'll be doing?
AA - So they are few objectives on this trip. One is to take advantage of a fantastic Africa-wide gathering taking place. Every two years the Africa Health Christian Association has a conference where Christian health associations from throughout Africa - from 21 different countries come together to share best practices about their work at the grass roots level and faith based networks, delivering health care around the continent. So I am going to be speaking to that gathering which will involve approximately 75 experts from all over the continent. I am going to be talking to them about my work here at USAID and opportunities for partnerships and for learning that we can have together.
In addition I am going to be talking a lot about our Feed the Future initiative which is the President and the Administrator's em flagship em project for economic growth and sustainable agriculture. Ghana is going to be a country where we are investing significant time and resources compared to many other countries around the world on the Feed the Future initiative. So I am going to be meeting with our country team leading the strategy as well having the opportunity as visiting several agriculture project sites some of them more recent and some of them that have been going on for decades in order to better understand the agricultural environment and context within which we will be working in Feed the Future.
AMIP News - Sounds great, now you did say that the US government has approved some new monies for Ghana? How much?, what kind of money are we talking about?
AA- So we are at a time here in the budget cycle in the US that we are listening very carefully to try to understand all the details of the budget that is coming out. You might have, some of your listeners may have seen on the news that there are very tense conversations happening in Washington right now between Republican and Democratic members of the House of Representatives. So the President has released his budget actually just in the last week for 2012 and believe it or not we are still debating over the remainder of 2011 budget so there are a lot of budget debates going on and this leaves a lot of our programs in some doubt and we are really pushing hard for the Feed the Future initiative and many of our other projects in Ghana to be not only continued but expanded, but we won't know the details and how that plays out for some time but I am going to be making sure to take the stories and the learning that I get out of this trip in Ghana back here in Washington to try and influence folks here to make sure that Ghana and our projects there in partnership with the government and people are fully supported.
AMIP News - That's great! I am beginning to wrap up now. If you just joined I am speaking with Ari Alexander who is Senior Advisor to the Administrator for NGO Partnerships and Global Engagement at USAID. My name is Frederick Nnoma-Addison and this is AMIP News once again.
Ari Alexander a question for you. The U.S. government, USAID works mostly in developing countries and spends so much resources engaging developing communities, now here in the states there is a huge constituency from developing countries. If you take Nigeria for example there are about a million Nigerians resident in America, that's a nation within a nation. What does the USAID and other development organizations do to engage this nation within the nation.
AA - Frederick I am so glad you asked that question, em the Obama administration has emphasized the incredible opportunity we have, to work with our African Diaspora community we have in the United States. There are so many examples, Nigerians as you mentioned, Somali Americans, Egyptian Americans, Armenian Americans.
All over the world, the places where we work have very strong communities throughout the United States. Here in Washington we have an incredibly large Ethiopian community here that we see on the streets every day as part of our daily lives, so indeed the United States is a place where people from all over the world live amongst one another. We have a series of efforts going on in order to more effectively engage the Diaspora community. It's something that we've traditionally not done enough of as an agency. And so we'd love to hear from your listeners, those of you who are in the United States and interested in learning about the work USAID does and being a part of conversations and partners, and how we can learn from your experiences. You may know about fantastic projects going on in Ghana that may not yet be on our radar screen and we’d like to learn about the kinds of projects and programs that you know about or you help to lead. Please do let us know. I will give an email address to your listeners.
AMIP News - Sure go ahead.
AA - Can feel free to email us if they are interested in being on an email list for future opportunities to engage in particular countries or region. The email address is FBCI@USAID.GOV, so that stands for Faith Based Community Initiatives at USAID.GOV and we'd love to hear from you with any ideas or suggestions you have or if are just interested in learning more about the work that we do around the world and I thank you very much.
AMIP News - So that's FBCI@USAID.GOV
AA - That's right
AMIP News - One last question before you go. Em USAID recently turned 50. What do
you see for USAID em in the next 50 years?
AA - So we are thrilled that Ghana is the country that we had our first Peace Corps program in the world. It's a country where we started working before USAID existed as an agency and today it's a country where more presidential and USAID initiatives are being supported than almost any other country in the world. We've had a long very exciting relationship with Ghana and we would like to say that we've played a small part in this success story that is Ghana. Ghana is pointing to around the world not only on the African continent, as one of the great success stories in development and we hope that in the next 50 years there will be more Ghana's and the Ghana's of the world would be donors. That's where we see ourselves going over time.
AMIP News - Well, Ari Alexander, Senior Advisor to Administrator for NGO Partnerships and Global Engagement USAID, any final comments before you get on that plane to Ghana?
AA - I can't wait to Ghana, it will be my first trip there, and eh now that you have an email address to reach me if your listeners have any recommendations for a good restaurant do let me know.
AMIP News - Before you go there's a great book out there, I was asking, there is a book that my organization published I don't know if you've found it within your office, the United States & Ghana: Celebrating 50 Years of Friendship & Progress In Pictures, if you can find it make it a carry on item and travel safe to Ghana.
AA - Thank you very much for your recommendation and thank you and your listeners for your time.
AMIP News - Thank you.
END - 1:53pm EST
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