USAID General Publications

From Principle to Practice: Implementing the Principle for Digital Development

For over a decade the international development community has been exploring how the use of digital technologies, including tools like the mobile phone, can extend the reach of development. At the same time, development organizations have grappled with how to use these technologies to make their own work more participatory, sustainable, and efective.

The results have been mixed. Some projects have succeeded, enabling improved and sustained access to information and services that previously were out of reach for marginalized populations. Other projects have failed, often due to preventable reasons, resulting in hundreds, if not thousands of projects being unable to scale.

In the late 2000s, several donors and multilateral organizations began talking about failure in using digital tools to support development. Soon, sets of principles, lessons, and best practices started emerging, beginning with the UNICEF Innovation Principles in 2009. One year later, a group of mHealth implementers and donors independently developed a diferent set of principles known as the Greentree Principles. The Principles for Digital Development (Principles) were created through the integration and refnement of these two previous sets of principles.

Semiannual Report to Congress: October 1, 2023 - March 31, 2024

Our (USAID) outreach and external engagements give our congressional stakeholders, oversight partners, aid organizations, and the public timely and relevant information related to our oversight of U.S. foreign assistance programs. We seek to inform stakeholders about our work, coordinate oversight as appropriate, and highlight ways in which the aid sector can promote accountability and good stewardship of U.S. foreign assistance funding.

USAID: Stop Work Guidelines

This document was created using LinkedIn posts by different consultants. The links to the posts have been added as footnotes on each page. The guidelines provide essential insights on handling Stop Work Orders (SWOs) issued under USAID contracts and cooperative agreements, including best practices for compliance, financial impact mitigation, and procedural steps for work resumption.

The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World: Finiancing to End Hunger, Food Insecurity, and Malnutrition in all its Forms (2024)

The reverse in progress and the persistently high levels of hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition in recent years have put the world off track to meet Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Targets 2.1 and 2.2 – to end hunger, food insecurity and all forms of malnutrition by 2030. Previous editions of this report have repeatedly highlighted the intensification of several major drivers of food insecurity and malnutrition, specifically conflict, climate variability and extremes, and economic slowdowns and downturns, combined with the well-established underlying factors that contribute to food insecurity and malnutrition, such as lack of access to and unaffordability of healthy diets, unhealthy food environments, and high and persistent inequality. Not only are these major drivers increasing in frequency and intensity, they are occurring concurrently more often, and in combination with the underlying factors, resulting in increasing numbers of hungry and food-insecure people. Depending on the major driver or combination of drivers affecting food security and nutrition in a country, addressing them will require a portfolio of policies across six transformative pathways, as outlined in detail in The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2021.

To attain the scale of actions needed, sufficient levels of and equal access to financing to address food security and nutrition challenges are essential. The theme of this year’s report focuses on the financing to meet SDG Targets 2.1 and 2.2 – financing to end hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition in all its forms.

USAID Digital Policy (2024 - 2034)

VISION AND PURPOSE: DEVELOPMENT IN A DIGITAL AGE

USAID envisions a world where open, inclusive, secure, and rights-respecting digital ecosystems enable people everywhere to thrive.

In today’s digitally connected world, there is a growing recognition that open, inclusive, secure, and rights-respecting digital ecosystems* —and the life-enhancing and lifesaving services they enable— are fundamental components of sustainable development and humanitarian response. Cutting across every sector, geography, and demographic, digital technologies and cybersecurity are a fundamental part of the development journeys of our partner countries and are increasingly crucial to deepening development cooperation, optimizing humanitarian action, and understanding and reacting to conflicts and crises. The digital landscape has shifted significantly in the last ten years as internet usage in low- and middle-income countries has roughly doubled.1 Internet platform companies now dominate the technology sector; devices have become smarter, smaller, and more ubiquitous; person-level data are being collected at unprecedented scale; and artificial intelligence (AI)2 is reshaping the way people work, access information, and engage with one another.

Optional Social Impact Assessment Framework

USAID, 

USAID’s programs, projects and activities assist communities in building greater resilience and, ultimately, becoming self-reliant. Agency decision-makers must balance the potential benefits of activities that aim to build resilience with the possibility that such efforts could have unintended adverse impacts on people and communities. To assist decision-makers in preventing or mitigating such impacts, USAID has a number of policies, guidelines, and vision statements that address issues faced by marginalized people and communities, including:
• Land, property and resource rights
• Human rights
• Environment
• Indigenous Peoples’ rights
• Labor
• Health and Safety
• Inclusive Development

2023 Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment Policy

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) affirms that gender equality and women’s and girls’ empowerment are fundamental for the realization of human rights and key to effective and sustainable development outcomes. For societies to thrive, women and girls, men and boys, and gender-diverse individuals must have the agency, social support, and structures to make their own choices and live free from violence and abuse. They must have equal rights and opportunities, as well as equal and safe access to and control over resources. Achieving gender equality in society will improve the overall quality of life for all people throughout their lives.

This policy provides the vision for USAID’s work to advance gender equality and women’s empowerment around the world—establishing our strategic objectives and driving investments across our operations and programs in order to achieve these aims

ADS Chapter 201: Program Cycle Operational Policy

The Program Cycle is USAID’s operational model for planning, delivering, assessing, and adapting development programming in a given region or country to advance U.S. foreign policy and national security. It encompasses guidance and procedures for:

1. Making evidence-based strategic decisions at the regional or country level about programmatic areas of focus, including efforts to advance a more coherent humanitarian-development-peace (HDP) approach as appropriate and feasible;
2. Designing projects and/or activities, and practicing development diplomacy, to implement these strategic plans; and
3. Learning from performance monitoring, evaluations, and other relevant sources of information to make course corrections as needed and inform future programming.

Guide To Inclusive Development Analysis

An Inclusive Development Analysis (IDA) is an analytic tool that assists in the inclusion of marginalized and underrepresented groups in policies and programming. 

An IDA aims to:

• Identify marginalized groups in a country;
• Review the social, economic, political, and cultural factors that lead to marginalization;
• Explain the differential impact of policies and programs on these groups and the general population;
• Determine access to assets, resources, opportunities, and services;
• Identify whether groups are excluded from development programs due to their identities; and
• Generate specific programmatic recommendations to increase inclusion of marginalized groups in programming and policy.

An IDA can support the mainstreaming of inclusive development considerations across USAID programs. It is an important first step in activity design and can be a standalone analysis and/or part of other analyses such as gender analysis or Political Economy Analysis. An IDA is also known by other names, including Social Inclusion Analysis or Gender and Social Inclusion Analysis.

Inclusive Development: Additional Help for ADS 201

This guidance (1) explains the concept of inclusive development and its importance to achieving USAID’s development goals, (2) serves as a framework for applying USAID policies and guidance that promote inclusion of and equity for marginalized and/or underrepresented groups, and (3) provides guidance to help Missions and Washington, D.C.-based Operating Units (OUs) integrate inclusive development considerations across the Program Cycle and in operations.

Inclusive Development: An equitable development approach built on the understanding that every individual and community, of all diverse identities and experiences, is instrumental in the transformation of their own societies. Their engagement throughout the development process leads to better outcomes.

This document is designed to help USAID Missions/OUs apply inclusion and equity principles into USAID’s programming. It provides guidance and recommended approaches on how to integrate inclusive development across the Program Cycle and in Mission operations.