USAID Enhance Activity Site Selection Report Addendum

The Activity aims to strengthen capacity of local governments and nongovernmental stakeholders in citizen-centric governance, promote communications, networking, and learning among government and nongovernmental stakeholders, and ensure wider adoption and/or institutionalization of successful local innovations that support citizen-centric governance. The Activity is based on the premise that mutually reinforcing efforts and deeper partnerships between government and nongovernment stakeholders will provide increased opportunities for citizens to participate in government and empower citizens to voice their concerns constructively. Strengthening communications, networking, and learning among government and nongovernmental stakeholders also plays an important role in promoting citizen-centric local governance, including through helping to scale governance innovations to additional regions and localities. The Activity is implemented through USAID Contract Number 72048622C00002 by Tetra Tech, with a period of performance from September 23, 2022, to September 22, 2027. The Activity will be implemented in Thailand nationwide, with local and national audiences in Thailand's Deep South (Yala, Pattani, Narathiwat, and some districts of Songkhla) and selected provinces in the North and Northeast. To achieve these objectives, the Activity works with local government organizations, namely provincial administrative organizations (PAOs), municipalities, and subdistrict administrative organizations (SAOs). The Activity will apply a differentiated approach to deal with the needs of underrepresented groups in these localities to ensure that their concerns, priorities, and experiences are an integral dimension of the design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of the Activity. The Institutional Selection Process (INSPR) tool is used by USAID Enhance for an objective and transparent selection of local government organizations to engage in Year 1 and the subsequent years. The INSPR methodology employs a data-driven, systematic approach to effectively select local governments and their civil society counterparts. This method includes a scorecard-based system for the initial pre-selection phase, focusing on evaluating organizations like PAOs, municipalities, and SAOs. The INSPR scorecard offers an objective and transparent way to evaluate PAOs, municipalities, and SAOs for potential partnership in USAID Enhance interventions. Designed to identify organizations most likely to benefit from and sustain USAID's assistance, the scorecard calculates a "sustainability quotient" based on the performance of these organizations in categories specifically aligned with USAID Enhance objectives and the need for active local support. The INSPR methodology has demonstrated its effectiveness in various countries and contexts, and it efficiently narrows down a large pool of organizations into more manageable subsets for the final stage of partner selection. The Activity will apply this methodology to select new provinces in the North and Northeast for the second year of implementation, as well as identify 19 additional focused local government organizations for the second year of implementation. The selection process for new provinces in the North and Northeast involves a preliminary screening of provinces based on specific criteria, followed by a refining of the screening criteria and the use of the INSPR scorecard tool to obtain selected provinces. The process and screening criteria for selecting local government organizations in Year 2 involve a careful and thorough screening of organizations to ensure that they are capable and interested in fully utilizing the provided technical assistance. The results of the site selection process for the second year of implementation include the selection of one new province in the North, one new province in the Northeast, and the inclusion of three municipalities or SAOs in each of these provinces. Additionally, three municipalities or SAOs in the provinces of Yala, Pattani, and Narathiwat and four municipalities or SAOs in the four districts of Songkhla province are included in the selection.