Last week USAID Administrator Raj Shah joined the Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid (ACVFA) to launch a working group focused on civil society collaboration under the Feed the Future initiative.

Co-chaired by David Beckmann of Bread for the World and Bruce McNamer of TechnoServe, the working group is tasked with developing an action plan for further deepening the engagement of civil society partners in Feed the Future. Read on to find out how you can provide input.

Administrator Shah delivers remarks at the ACVFA public meeting on June 12, 2013. Photo credit: Pat Adams, USAID

USAID – along with the nine other agencies that make up the Feed the Future initiative – recognizes that achieving sustainable solutions to global challenges such as hunger requires us to work in close collaboration with countries, citizens, partners, and the wider development community in almost every facet of our work. Partnership with civil society brings in expertise and awareness that allows our development efforts to have a broader impact and helps us use U.S. taxpayer dollars more efficiently and effectively as we pursue our development goals.

With this in mind, we’re excited to work with this diverse group of advisors to deepen and broaden the impact of the U.S. Government’s Feed the Future initiative. We know our civil society partners here in the United States and overseas have been looking for more formal avenues to input into Feed the Future and we look forward to incorporating additional voices and widening the scope of participants and stakeholders in this process.

Through the action plan, the working group seeks to strengthen collective progress toward the specific goals and focal areas of Feed the Future. (If you’re not familiar with them, you can find them outlined on the Feed the Future website.)

We’ve narrowed the scope of the working group by outlining five key areas where the U.S. Government is eager to hear from nongovernmental organizations, implementing partners, and other private voluntary organizations working to fight hunger and undernutrition.

The task of the working group will be to identify a set of five to ten actions within these areas where greater collaboration will maximize Feed the Future’s impact.

These key areas are:

  • Propose 2-3 specific actions that should be highlighted or prioritized within the Feed the Future Learning Agenda, or related to high profile crosscutting issues like climate, nutrition or gender, where the U.S. Government and the international NGO community can work against a common set of milestones.
  • Highlight 2-3 concrete actions that the NGO community and the U.S. Government can commit to work on together on that will strengthen local civil society with consideration to building resilience to recurrent crisis (e.g. focusing on capacity building across all programming, supporting NGO platforms organized by food and nutrition stakeholders, advancing local stakeholder education, promoting an enabling legal environment for local civil society).
  • Define a common message on the importance of eradicating extreme hunger, undernutrition and poverty that can be reflected across Feed the Future and the stakeholder community and identify new ways to communicate this message frame effectively to the American people.
  • Define or adopt a method to gauge the quality of stakeholder engagement in Feed the Future and in focus countries (e.g. possible adoption of the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program’s Quality of Participation Guidelines).
  • Propose a method for ensuring accountability and transparency from civil society and the U.S. Government in following up on the workstreams laid out in the final recommendations of this group.

The questions and comments raised by audience members at the launch of the Feed the Future working group were insightful and thought-provoking, and we’re sure there are plenty more. Now is your chance to weigh in on what you believe to be issues of high priority. The working group wants to hear from you.

Send your comments on the above items to ACVFA@usaid.gov and we’ll make sure your thoughts get to the working group members.