The U.S. government plans to spend another $1 billion in Uganda through 2015 -- and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) will devote an additional $17.5 million specifically towards helping its Uganda unit to become more "adaptive, modern" and "effective."
The $1 billion figure is part of the Obama Administration's $3.5 billion 2011-2015 Ugandan strategy, which aims to cut that nation's poverty in half ("$3.5 Billion 'Plan Uganda' Seeks to Cut Poverty in Half -- While Reducing 'Cattle Raiding,' Too"; U.S. Trade & Aid Monitor, 5/18/11)).
The agency will hire a private contractor to carry out this "monitoring, evaluation, and learning" initiative over five years, it said in a solicitation (#SOL-617-12-000021) released Nov. 24 that the Monitor located through routine database research. During that time USAID/Uganda hopes to improve, in sum, how it carries out assistance programs in the East African nation.
The solicitation acknowledges that USAID/Uganda is embarking upon this new contract vehicle following a separate series of monitoring and evaluation (M&E) projects. It points out that while the contractor (The Mitchell Group, Inc.) satisfied agency requirements for M&E, "busy Mission staff still placed little attention on M&E data and did not utilize the data for learning."
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