DEPUTY ADMINISTRATOR COLEMAN: Thanks Julie and Rob for getting us started today. It’s great to be here with you, alongside our colleagues from the National Security Council, State, and Defense Departments.
First, let me just say that Rob and Julie are leading an incredible team here at USAID that has devoted countless hours to a full interagency effort to bring the Global Fragility Act to life through the U.S. Strategy to Prevent Conflict and Promote Stability.
The milestone we’re approaching, with an “imminent” announcement of the Strategy’s areas of focus, would not be possible without the dedication of our civil society, donor, and implementing partners, so I want to extend my gratitude to all of you as well.
With the number of countries experiencing armed conflict at the highest level it’s been in decades, this is an especially difficult time for those working to promote peace and stability around the world.
Our ability to support those in need is spread thin, and as many of you know, we’ve been striving to find new, more effective ways to prevent conflict and violence, build resilience, and empower local change agents to sustain our efforts in the long-term.
The heartbreaking developments over the last month in Ukraine only emphasize the need for the United States to move quickly to operationalize the goals set forth in the bipartisan Global Fragility Act.
I’d like to touch on a few ways that USAID is planning to tackle the challenges outlined in the Strategy to Prevent Conflict and Promote Stability.
First and foremost, we must confront our own bureaucratic obstacles that plague implementation of conflict prevention and stability programming.
At USAID, we are focused on giving our Missions more flexibility to adapt to changing local conditions in complex environments. In practice, this means taking a careful look at management, coordination, authority, and resource challenges; making policy adjustments where necessary; and allowing those whose lives are directly impacted by conflict to drive our decision making.
A critical component of giving our Missions the latitude they need to respond to real time conflict developments is USAID’s localization agenda. The consensus across development sectors is overwhelming: local actors must be in the driver’s seat and no outside government or entity should impose its vision upon the challenges that our country partners face. Fortunately, this long-sought approach has strong bipartisan support in Congress, which is why the Strategy underscores the importance of working with host-country counterparts and local partners to provide the foundation for locally-led stabilization and prevention efforts.
We’re also focused on supporting innovation in the digital space to give country partners and local communities the tools they need to defend democratic progress against creeping authoritarianism.
As we are seeing in Ukraine and other conflict-affected regions, this battle between democracy and autocracy is increasingly being fought online. The very same tools once believed to be a means of expanding freedom and democracy are also being used to undermine hard-won democratic progress and stability. Thus, our ability to work with local innovators in support of “rights-respecting” and resilient digital ecosystems is critical to enabling peace and resilience.
A significant benefit to this Strategy being implemented over a 10-year period is that we have the opportunity to iterate—to learn what works with routine monitoring, analysis, evaluation of evidence, and adaptation. We’ll do this collaboratively with State and DoD counterparts to address knowledge gaps in specific country contexts in the near-term, while also informing a robust evidence base to address long-term causes of conflict and instability.
And finally, as each of these lines of effort indicates, we are fully embracing an interagency approach.
We know that assistance alone cannot adequately address the drivers of conflict. That’s why the Strategy calls for a new, high-level National Security Council-led Steering Committee with interagency representatives to engage externally with civil society and other stakeholders, ensuring alignment of policy, resources, and tools across the government. As the representative to the committee from USAID, I am excited to get these efforts underway.
So, to answer your opening question Julie, these are the five things that USAID is working to deliver under the Global Fragility Act and the Strategy to Prevent Conflict and Promote Stability: Cutting bureaucratic red tape; empowering local partners; supporting digital innovation; investing in learning and analysis; and embracing an interagency approach…and we’re ready to get to work.