Transition Initiatives

Description

Supports USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI), which addresses opportunities and challenges in countries in crisis and assists in their transition toward stability, peace, good governance, and democracy. OTI programs work with local partners to target key issues including conflict, violent extremism, and stabilization.

What Does This Buy?

Funds are provided to partners through grants, cooperative agreements, and other mechanisms to implement programming that target key transitions to democracy for countries in crisis and quick-impact activities for conflict prevention or stabilization.

Justification for the Request

• Violence and violent conflict, rather than natural disasters, are now the leading causes of global displacement. OTI’s capacities are critical to stem the tide of violent conflict, which now costs the global economy $14.76 trillion a year.
• OTI provides fast, flexible, short-term assistance targeted at key political transition and stabilization needs, catalyzing local initiatives.
• OTI encourages experimentation and agility, measuring success by positive changes in local communities and how effectively and rapidly programs adapt.
• OTI has shaped a range of communities during times of volatility, including establishing administrative service centers in Ukraine, supporting Nigeria’s formal Demobilization, Disassociation, Reintegration, and Reconciliation strategy and action plan for preventing and countering violent extremism, and launching recovery programs across Sirte, Libya.

U.S. Interest

• In Burma, OTI brought together political parties, civil society, and ethnic armed groups to engage in the peace process. These efforts, which contributed to the signing of a Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement by eight ethnic armed groups, helps maintain momentum toward a sustainable peace between all groups after decades of armed conflict.
• In Honduras, which has one of the highest homicide rates in the world, the OTI Safe Schools Initiative brought together school officials, parents, the surrounding community, local government, and the police to plan and implement small-scale security improvements to schools suffering from the effects of gang influence. In one case, a high school was on the verge of shutting down – enrollment had dropped from 1,700 students to 412. OTI programming resulted in a 98% enrollment increase to 816 students. The Honduran police then reached out on their own to 16 additional schools to begin developing similar security plans.

Bold Vision

• Additional investment could allow OTI to seize key windows of opportunity in more cases, supporting significant transitions across the globe and reducing the need for costly military interventions from lost opportunities.
• OTI often works in fewer than 15 contexts at a time, but more countries are in crisis. With additional investment, OTI could quickly apply its fast and flexible model to more contexts, not just the most extreme cases.
• OTI is by nature a hub of innovation, and additional investment would provide the opportunity to apply its innovative thinking to different kinds of activities and with new partners.

Impact of Cuts

• Cuts could risk missing opportunities to stabilize volatile regions at critical moments. Transition programs are designed for key windows of opportunity. If those opportunities are missed, there could be much greater and longer-lasting costs from reconstruction efforts later.
• Cuts could weaken the United States’ ability to prevent violent extremism and hinder complementary diplomatic and military efforts.