On July 4 the Washington Post Magazine published “This is War,” a sobering profile of U.S. Agency for International Development professionals working to improve conditions in Afghanistan and Iraq under exceedingly treacherous circumstances.
As the piece highlights, the work these dedicated civilians perform is as critical to establishing security and stability in both nations as the higher profile military activities we usually read about. However, the piece failed to mention that those government employees work alongside thousands of equally dedicated private-sector implementing partners supporting the agency’s missions.
Like their government counterparts, those skilled professionals working under development contracts and grants venture “outside the wire” every day to build viable local governments and economies. USAID relies on their indispensible skills in engineering, health, education, governance, agriculture and more to accomplish its objectives. As a recent Government Accountability Office report noted, these implementing partners are a majority of the agency’s workforce, even if the agency failed to account for them in its strategic workforce plans. Failure to account for these employees, and their contributions, not only undermines their skills, but threatens to undermine USAID’s very mission as the agency could never hire enough people with the right skills to perform all of the work that needs to be done around the world. Nor would it want to, as that would severely limit the agency’s flexibility to respond to simultaneous needs as divergent as wartime reconstruction, natural disaster and emergency response, AIDS prevention, educating women and developing sustainable economies in the developing world.
The deadly July 2 attack on the Development Alternatives Inc. compound in Kunduz, Afghanistan, and the July 12 terrorist bombing in Kampala, Uganda that killed an employee of a non-profit firm, both demonstrate that everyone working to carry out USAID’s mission does so at significant personal risk. USAID and its implementing partners do extraordinary work in some of the toughest conditions imaginable. We should be grateful to and compliment them all for their dedication and commitment.
PSC wrote a letter to the Washington Post on July 6 expressing these sentiments in response to the July 4 article. It has not been published, so we thought we’d post our thoughts here instead.
As the piece highlights, the work these dedicated civilians perform is as critical to establishing security and stability in both nations as the higher profile military activities we usually read about. However, the piece failed to mention that those government employees work alongside thousands of equally dedicated private-sector implementing partners supporting the agency’s missions.
Like their government counterparts, those skilled professionals working under development contracts and grants venture “outside the wire” every day to build viable local governments and economies. USAID relies on their indispensible skills in engineering, health, education, governance, agriculture and more to accomplish its objectives. As a recent Government Accountability Office report noted, these implementing partners are a majority of the agency’s workforce, even if the agency failed to account for them in its strategic workforce plans. Failure to account for these employees, and their contributions, not only undermines their skills, but threatens to undermine USAID’s very mission as the agency could never hire enough people with the right skills to perform all of the work that needs to be done around the world. Nor would it want to, as that would severely limit the agency’s flexibility to respond to simultaneous needs as divergent as wartime reconstruction, natural disaster and emergency response, AIDS prevention, educating women and developing sustainable economies in the developing world.
The deadly July 2 attack on the Development Alternatives Inc. compound in Kunduz, Afghanistan, and the July 12 terrorist bombing in Kampala, Uganda that killed an employee of a non-profit firm, both demonstrate that everyone working to carry out USAID’s mission does so at significant personal risk. USAID and its implementing partners do extraordinary work in some of the toughest conditions imaginable. We should be grateful to and compliment them all for their dedication and commitment.
PSC wrote a letter to the Washington Post on July 6 expressing these sentiments in response to the July 4 article. It has not been published, so we thought we’d post our thoughts here instead.
