Feed the Future Enabling Environment for Food Security: Mid-Year Report: Year 1

The project aimed to augment the capacity of USAID/Washington bureaus and Feed the Future focus and aligned Missions worldwide to address constraints to the enabling environment for food security. Through a demand-driven mechanism, USAID secured technical analysis services, advisory services, and strategic knowledge management services to identify key enabling environment constraints, catalyze country-led reform initiatives, and facilitate learning and exchange. The project was structured as a Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) with a one-year base period for implementation, along with four annual options to extend the project. Project services were driven by call orders issued by USAID for discrete support services. During the first year, USAID issued two call orders involving numerous activities. The project team provided support in the area of regional seed regulatory harmonization in Southern Africa, designed and implemented a knowledge management assessment, and provided substantive support across a range of requests from the Office of Market and Partnership Innovations. The USAID Southern Africa Regional Seed Sector (SARSS) Assessment was conducted under Call Order 1. The assessment aimed to gather information and analyze the status of the regulatory environment for the regional seed market throughout the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC). The project team provided field support to the USAID/Southern Africa Regional Mission, meeting with more than 50 representatives from across the seed sector in South Africa, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Mozambique. The assessment team found that while many of the legal instruments required to launch a regional seed harmonization regulation are in place, institutional capacity remains lacking within SADC to fully implement the regional seed system. The knowledge management assessment was conducted concurrently with the BPA award and launch. The project used a mixed methodology to reach priority stakeholders, including an emailed online survey completed by 60 USAID staff and 226 stakeholders. The assessment aimed to identify knowledge gaps and provide recommendations for targeted content creation, design, and distribution. The findings from the assessment informed the development of a knowledge management strategy to support the project's objectives. The project team also provided support under Call Order 2, which included a global support unit for USAID in the area of agribusiness enabling environment reforms and short-term "on-demand consulting" support. The BPA Key Personnel have been primarily dedicated to management and implementation under Call Order 2 since December 24, 2015. The project's activities have been focused on supporting the USAID/Southern Africa Regional Mission in negotiating the work plan for a newly-launched regional SADC HSR institutional capacity support mechanism.