USAID New Partner's Industry Day: It's about how USAID Works-Acting Mission Director

The United States Agency for International Development, USAID, has said that its intention for organizing a one-day USAID Partner's Industry Day retreat is to explain its processes and workings to local Nigerian organizations and Non-Governmental Organizations, NGOs.

Acting Mission Director, Sarah Werth, made the disclosure while speaking with FreshNews multi-media in Abuja on Thursday.

Werth explained that the event became imperative in the light of USAID’s intention to have more local partner on its fold in order to broaden the number of direct awards to local Nigerian organizations particularly as the agency expands its scope to new frontiers.

“I’m very excited to have what we called industry day. It is an opportunity to invite local organizations, Nigerian NGOs and explain how USAID works, explain our processes so that we can partner together and really try to increase the number of draft awards to local Nigerian organizations. We work with a number of international organizations and this is an opportunity to work directly with local Nigerian organizations as we consider designs and programmes in new areas,” she said.

Obviously elated with the level of interaction among the participants, Werth noted that USAID learnt so much from the different interest groups that were represented at the one-day interactive meeting which covered such diverse areas as education, economic, energy, etc. 

While expressing the belief that the participants themselves also learnt so much from interacting with USAID, particularly in the area of what the partnership can achieve in the future, she explained that USAID is in the process of evolving new operational schedules in line with the first grade information gleaned from the inaugural event.   

“We learnt so much from the interaction from the different groups and they are representing different sectors from education, economic growth, energy. We learnt about the different challenges they are facing and we are hoping they learnt a bit from us, from what we are doing.

“This is the beginning of the conversation and we are in the process of putting together new designs, so we have first grade information for our transparent processes and we look forward to hearing from organizations to respond to the different designs we will be engaging,” she said.