Strategies for Achieving the Objective
The world is coalescing around a goal to end extreme poverty by 2030, with growing optimism that this remarkable goal is within reach. The U.S. role is critical to ensuring continued global progress. American ingenuity is essential to solving the most complex development challenges that stand in the way of a world without extreme poverty.
The Department and USAID are making critical contributions toward achieving this goal. Ending extreme poverty requires enabling inclusive growth and promoting free, peaceful, and self-reliant societies that build human capital and create social safety nets for the poorest members of society, including women and other marginalized groups, such as people with disabilities, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) people, and members of indigenous or ethnic minority groups. Engagement can open doors for development by resolving conflict, fostering political stability, and advocating development-friendly policies. U.S. government initiatives that increase food security, reduce deaths from preventable illness, and improve energy access address fundamental causes of poverty. USAID's work on education and resilience in the face of recurrent crisis is reaching millions in extreme poverty, and cross-cutting efforts on gender, governance, and climate are key to sustainability. USAID is also strongly positioned in the countries - many of them fragile - where extreme poverty affects the most people.
The Department and USAID promote inclusive growth through initiatives such as the African Women's
Entrepreneurship Program (AWEP), which provides professional networking, business development, and trade capacity building opportunities for prominent women entrepreneurs across Sub-Saharan Africa. AWEP includes an export readiness program, technical assistance, and increased access to capital. It empowers small-and-medium-sized African enterprises to capitalize on the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, increasing trade regionally and with the United States. USAID’s Women’s Leadership Incentive Fund is also used annually to leverage Mission funding in support of women’s economic empowerment and female entrepreneurs are key participants in USAID’s worldwide economic growth projects. For example, using Leadership Funds, women in Bangladesh will be empowered to lead on employment and labor reform in the apparel sector, a crucial arena for promoting inclusive economic growth.
Access to schooling is critical for breaking the transmission of extreme poverty from one generation to the next.
In developing countries, an additional year of schooling increases earnings by more than 10 percent. More broadly, each 10 percentage point increase in the share of students with basic literacy boosts economic growth by 0.3 percentage points per year. Basic literacy and math skills raise prospects for finding a better job and have substantial positive spillovers like improved health, lower fertility, less crime, and greater civic participation.
USAID's Policy Framework features eight inter-related development objectives: (1) increase food security;
(2) promote global health and health systems; (3) reduce the impact of climate change and promote low emissions growth; (4) promote sustainable, broad-based economic growth; (5) expand and sustain the ranks of
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stable, prosperous, and democratic states; (6) provide humanitarian assistance and support disaster mitigation;
(7) prevent and respond to crises, conflict, and instability; and (8) improve lives through learning and
education. Poverty is multi-dimensional, and elements of each of these eight objectives are essential to address the causes and consequences of extreme poverty and promote inclusive growth.
USAID is establishing a new development model that focuses on creating public-private partnerships and
harnessing science, technology, and innovation to deliver measurable results. The new model is grounded in the reality that political leadership and policy reform are essential preconditions to driving investment to the regions and sectors where it has the biggest impact on reducing extreme poverty and ending the most devastating consequences of child hunger and child death. This approach requires integrated diplomatic and development efforts as policy reform is sought and promotes investment and responsible business conduct in complex and transitional environments.
Strategic Objective Progress Update Resilience to Recurrent Crisis:
In late 2011 and early 2012, building resilience to recurrent crisis emerged as a U.S. government priority. Large-scale droughts in 2011-2012 once again underscored the costs of not addressing the underlying causes of recurrent crises in the Horn of Africa and Sahel. These include the humanitarian costs measured in lost lives, livelihoods, dignity, and aspirations, as well as the developmental costs to national and regional economies. For example, unfettered drought in Kenya between 2008 and 2011 is estimated to have cost the Kenyan economy
$12 billion. It also includes the economic costs of repeatedly responding to these crises with humanitarian assistance as attested to by the $1.5 billion the U.S. government spent in responding to humanitarian crises in the Horn of Africa and Sahel in 2011-2012 alone. Together with its development partners, USAID is committed to the shared goal of building resilience to get ahead of chronic crisis, protect and advance development gains, and make populations around the world less vulnerable to inevitable shocks.
In FY 2015, USAID continued to support efforts to build resilience to recurrent crisis in vulnerable, dry-land areas in the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia and Kenya, and nascent efforts in Uganda and Somalia), the Sahel (Niger and Burkina Faso), and Nepal. These efforts support country-led strategies and aim to sustainably expand economic opportunities on and off farms; strengthen natural resource, conflict and disaster risk management; and
improve health, nutrition, and human capital. Illustrative achievements from these efforts include over 300,000 farmers and pastoralists using new or improved technologies and management practices and a 28 percent increase in the dietary diversity of women in the focus zones in Kenya; more than half a million hectares of land under improved Natural Resource Management and more than $15 million of private sector investment in the livestock sector facilitated in Ethiopia; and more than 500,000 children under five years of age reached by nutrition programs in vulnerable communities and more than 240,000 farmers who have applied new
technologies or management practices in Niger and Burkina Faso. USAID’s continued efforts to build resilience in the Horn of Africa and the Sahel are built on foundational Food for Peace development programs and Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance Risk Reduction investments, and have reached more than 7.5 million people.
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In FY 2015, the Global Resilience Partnership (Resilience Partnership), a public-private partnership between USAID, the Swedish International Development Coordination Agency, and the Rockefeller Foundation, announced eight winning teams of the first Global Resilience Partnership Challenge. The Challenge was a competition designed to surface innovation and capacities among partner institutions and called for multi-sectoral teams to collaborate on innovative solutions to the toughest resilience challenges in the three focus regions. Winning teams will receive up to $1 million each to implement resilience-building solutions among the most vulnerable populations in the focus regions.
Additional Evidence Measuring Achievement of the Objective
Key Indicator: Proportion of countries with focused resilience zones that have exhibited reduced depth of poverty rates within those zones
FY 2015 FY 2016 FY 2017
Target 50% 50% 75%
Result 100%1
Indicator Analysis
This indicator measures the proportion of countries with focused resilience zones where data from
representative population-based surveys in those zones show a reduction in the depth of poverty between two points in time. Countries are only included in the indicator once they have at least two data points to compare.
Thus far, baseline data on poverty rates have been collected for focused resilience zones in Kenya and Ethiopia to determine an initial baseline. Interim survey results for resilience efforts in northern Kenya suggest steady progress towards USAID’s goal of reducing the depth of poverty by 20 percent. Improved dietary diversity among children and women, as well as a reduction in household hunger, shows similarly positive results.
Additional depth of poverty survey results are anticipated for Ethiopia and Burkina Faso/Niger in 2017.
Surveys in FY 2015 collected baseline poverty data for focused resilience zones in Burkina Faso/Niger. Baseline surveys are planned for Mali and Nepal in 2016, both of which have been delayed due to a deterioration of the security situation in the country, and an earthquake, respectively. A baseline survey is planned for Uganda in 2017.
Priority resilience countries and focus resilience zones within these countries have been identified and defined based on a set of four criteria: recurrent crisis in the form of repeated, large-scale humanitarian emergencies;
risk as defined by hazards and vulnerability to them; the enabling environment, defined by government partner
1 A second data point is only available for the focused resilience zones in Kenya. A second data point for Ethiopia is anticipated in 2016/17, for Burkina Faso/Niger in 2017, and for Somalia in 2018.
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political will and commitments; and USAID's comparative advantage in terms of the opportunities to sequence, layer, and integrate new and existing humanitarian and development investments to achieve the shared aim of building resilience to recurrent crisis (see Building Resilience to Recurrent Crisis: USAID Policy and Program Guidance for further information.)
Indicator Methodology
Data source: Data are obtained from secondary data sources, by abstracting focused resilience zone clusters from national-level population-based surveys, such as the Living Standards Measurement Survey or equivalent, and/or from a combination of USAID baseline, interim, and final population-based surveys.
Data quality: Performance data, verified using Data Quality Assessments (DQAs), must meet standards of validity, integrity, precision, reliability, and timeliness. Each Operating Unit must document the methodology used to conduct the DQAs. DQA and data source records are maintained in the Performance Management Plans. (For details, refer to USAID's Automated Directive System [ADS] Chapter 203.3.11,
http://www.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/documents/1870/203.pdf).