EQUIP2 Final Report.pdf - Education Policy Data Center

do this for $1 million, but here’s what we can do,” and that allowed us
to negotiate a more responsible project. The design team would create the
proposal on the ground in cooperation with the government, the mission,
and other stakeholders. In the competitive process, there’s only so much
information you can garner. With EQUIP, we could involve the main
players.
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Conclusions
Allowing for interactive, participatory, and detailed planning among
the ministry, the implementer, and USAID reduces uncertainty and
misunderstandings. It is a key strategy for ensuring that the people involved
have direct ownership of the project.
Additionally, as previously mentioned, EQUIP occurred during a period
when education programming was growing quickly in USAID missions
around the world, and the ease of the EQUIP mechanism made it possible
for such programming to expand quite rapidly over a period of nine
years. The same expansion might not have been possible if full and open
competition was used for each mission. Another benefit to the mechanism
was the link between the research of the Leader award and the technical
aspects of the associate awards, even though this link was not as strong as
it might have been. In summary, the pre-competed aspect of the award
provided tangible benefits to USAID missions and bureaus as a flexible,
responsive, participatory, and rapid mechanism.
When designing mechanisms that have a Leader and associate
award component, it is useful to have a formal link between them to
ensure effective knowledge translation from research to projects.
When it was first designed, the EQUIP mechanism incorporated a specific
lesson learned from previous indefinite quantity contracts (IQCs): missions,
not the Leader award, should have direct control over projects in order to
ensure ownership and to reflect mission and country priorities. However,
the EQUIPs were criticized for the lack of a formal connection between the
Leader and associate awards, particularly in terms of research. There were
several reasons for this lack of connection.
First, no one anticipated the tremendous demand for associate awards, or the
range of interventions these demands would represent. When the research
agenda was originally set, the education policy expert team had to make
informed judgments about the key issues facing education development
without the associates awards as they were not yet available. For example, in
2003, two of the anticipated research areas were emergency education and
HIV/AIDS, both of which were urgent topics at the time. However, neither
theme was determined to be important in the associate awards. Second,