Linking relief and development in the Greater Horn of Africa : USAID constraints and recommendations

The report uses USAID"s experience in post-war Ethiopia as a central point of reference, but also draws upon the experiences of the Agency in other countries in the region, including Eritrea, Somalia, and Rwanda. Constraints were found to revolve around five areas: USAID"s corporate culture, in which disaster and development experts are divided by separate offices, programing systems and objectives, and funding sources; legislative and regulatory requirements that inhibit smooth transitions and of which USAID staff are sometimes unaware; financial and human resource limitations; programming planning processes that are still conducted in isolation from one another, limiting the Agency"s ability to combine resources to meet country needs; and policy and procedural constraints. The report recommends: (1) changes in employee evaluation and promotion criteria that will demonstrate the value USAID places on staff with experience in transitional situations and demonstrated ability to promote relief to development linkages; (2) new training programs to promote dialogue between relief and development experts; (3) program planning changes, including the promotion of an Integrated Strategic Planning(ISP) process for transition countries; (4) supplementary guidance and technical support to help Missions understand and operationalize USAID"s new Results Reporting and Resource Request (R4) requirements; (5) adoption of the Inter-Agency Team"s Principles and Operating Guidelines to Linking Relief and Development as an Agency policy paper and reference tool for strategic planning; (6) a USAID, and possibly an inter-agency, approach to Congress to identify and recommend solutions to problems created by legislation, including earmarks; (7) new standards for Agency evaluations; and (8) policy and procedural changes to improve relief-development linkages, including better support to host governments in transition, revision of Bureau for Humanitarian Response (BHR) emergency proposal guidelines, stronger BHR/Africa Bureau collaboration, the development of alternatives to the traditional partnering strategy for promoting indigenous organizations, and consideration of special procedures for operating in the Greater Horn region.