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	Joint Strategic Planning and Reporting Performance Summary
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USAID and Department of State: Joint Strategic Planning and Reporting

Given the close coordination and complementary nature of USAID and the Department of State’s foreign assistance programs, the agencies issued a Joint State-USAID Strategic Plan for FY 2004-2009¹. This plan included a planning framework with 12 strategic goals, focusing on policy, program, and management areas that reflect the agencies’ highest priorities. USAID has focused its work around three of the four strategic objectives and eight of the 12 strategic goals that capture the breadth of its mission (see the Joint State-USAID Strategic Planning Framework on the next page). USAID either does not have programs in the remaining four strategic goal areas, or does not have meaningful indicators or targets which require reporting of performance results in the Performance and Accountability Report (PAR).

Consistent with the Joint State-USAID Strategic Plan, this year’s PAR now includes a Joint State-USAID Performance Section. Although the Joint Performance Section clearly identifies those indicators that are managed by USAID, the indicators managed by the Department of State are also presented to provide a more complete picture of how the two agencies are working together in support of the three strategic objectives and eight strategic goals that they share. USAID and the Department of State are also reporting separately on agency-specific resources invested to achieve these performance and strategic goals.

Each indicator table in the Performance Section shows the logo of the agency responsible for gathering, reporting, and validating the performance data for that indicator, as shown below:

USAID

Department of State

Joint State-USAID Strategic Planning Framework

D

The FY 2004-2009 Joint State-USAID Strategic Plan can be found online at the following link:
http://www.state.gov/m/rm/rls/dosstrat/2004/

Strategic Planning Framework Quick Reference Guide

Five-tiered Methodology

The Agency is committed to utilizing the funds it receives from taxpayers through Congress to produce successful results. In FY 2006, USAID employed the programming and reporting structure depicted in the pyramid below. USAID reports on performance at several levels, with each descending level representing a more detailed breakout of the programs USAID implements. At the USAID operating unit level, indicators are drawn from a set of common program components utilized across the Agency. These indicators measure progress toward an operating unit’s strategic objectives, which in turn measure achievement toward performance goals. Performance results in this report utilize program component indicators aggregated across the Agency to report at the performance goal levels shared with the Department of State.

D

Data Reliability, Completeness, And Validity

USAID performance results for FY 2006 are matched to the performance and strategic goals in the Joint State-USAID Strategic Plan. Many of these results are preliminary because USAID’s final fiscal year performance results are typically not available until mid to late-December. This necessitates estimating performance results data, a practice accepted by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for purposes of reporting in the PAR. Acceptable methods for data estimation include (1) expert opinion, (2) historical trends, (3) extrapolation, and (4) sampling and statistics.

As indicated in the Agency’s Automated Directive System (ADS) Chapter 203.3.5, (http://www.usaid.gov/policy/ads/200/203.pdf), the data provided by USAID operating units for these estimates are expected to be verified through Data Quality Assessments (DQA) and meet five data quality standards of validity, integrity, precision, reliability, and timeliness.

The methodology used for obtaining the data must be well documented and each operating unit must provide annual certification of its strategic objectives and their relationship to the Agency’s strategic goals.

In FY 2006, USAID’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) conducted a limited review of USAID’s internal controls for verifying its data. The OIG determined that the Agency’s compliance with its policies and procedures for verifying performance data needs improvement. USAID intends to address this issue as part of the new performance management information system being developed to support foreign assistance reform.

All final performance results will be reported after year-end data is received from field operating units later in the calendar year.

1. This plan will be revised in FY 2007 to reflect the foreign assistance reforms announced by Secretary of State Rice in January 2006. (back to text)

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