Mon, Mar 30, 2009
Erik PetersonThank you. And Jim, USAID NGOs success stories.
James FranckiewiczWe work with them all the time. I believe we have a new system that's working very well. It's called FACTS. It's a computer that everything is fed into. And the fellow that works with me, Dan Dealy, that's responsible for getting his hands onto all this information is just in love with the FACTS system now. Anyway, he is downloading all of this information. And the last time he downloaded all of our cooperating partners, our contractors, grantees for cooperative agreements and grants, there were a hundred and seventy firms. And most of them were very small amounts of money. And so almost all of the hundred and seventy, the majority of them, are PVOs and NGOs. And so yes, we use them in many, many places. In Afghanistan I was using them for construction, which I wouldn't -- well, that isn't a typical way of doing construction. Usually you go through the private sector, because a grant agreement means that there's a lot of freedom involved. If you give people money under a grant, they're free to go out and do things. And if you say I'd like to build these roads, they're free to go out and build roads, but that doesn't mean I can go out and say I don't like the roads you're building. And so anyway, USAID has many contracting mechanisms, and we use consultants, and we use contractors, and we use cooperative agreements, and we use grant agreements, in order to accomplish our business. And if you look at many things, health is probably the biggest thing. I would say primarily PVOs and NGOs. I would say the global health AIDS initiative is probably mostly PVOs and NGOs working, so they play a large role.