Performance evaluation of the USAID–Department of Energy interagency agreement

Department of Energy have held an interagency agreement (IAA) since 2009 that provides technical support to Agency missions and their in-country partners to achieve low-emissions goals, access clean power, and increase self-resilience in the energy sector. Under the IAA, the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) also creates and supports technical platforms and delivers technical assistance to help stakeholders achieve these goals. This performance evaluation identified areas of prioritization and opportunities to improve collaboration for the new five-year IAA between USAID and NREL. The evaluation focused on three questions to identify whether the IAA met missions’ needs, understand usage of IAA technical platforms, and capture strengths and weaknesses in the partnership. The evaluation used a mixed methods approach including 274 surveys, 89 interviews, 2 focus groups, 1 process-mapping workshop, and a document review with a range of IAA stakeholders. Findings suggested the IAA provided cutting-edge technical support to missions and host-country governments, and that use of technical platforms is somewhat limited but users vary within sectors and organization types. It is likely there are training spillover effects, because survey respondents reported also using IAA technical platforms on which they had not received training. Barriers to use of technical platforms include bandwidth issues, users’ software and hardware limitations, competing platforms, and user capacity. Recommendations to USAID and NREL include revising IAA partner roles, creating a theory of change reflective of current work with a robust monitoring, evaluation, and learning strategy, and identifying new methods to capture diverse IAA benefits.