The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has assumed a larger role in US international food assistance after the shuttering of USAID. Earlier this year, USDA issued a call for proposals to provide emergency food assistance in the form of US-grown and produced agricultural commodities. USDA is poised to do more, recently releasing a Request for Information (RFI) for non-emergency Title II Food for Peace (FFP) programs and promising to learn from past programs to “ensure assistance has the greatest impact.” The RFI asks a lot of good questions on design, innovation, and efficiency.
If designed and implemented well, this programming can bridge the gap between emergency food needs and longer-term food security and resilience. Why does “resilience” matter? Not only does it indicate deeper success for its own sake, but it also means lowering the demand on the US taxpayer in the future to keep pouring money into short-run, not-long-lasting programs. The administration speaks of wanting to stop waste—programming for resilience is just that, with a bit of foresight.
USDA should seize this opportunity to maximize the impact of these programs by following the evidence and focusing on cost-effectiveness. We worked at USAID’s Office of the Chief Economist (OCE)—as the Agency Chief Economist and senior advisors—and offer lessons from our work on USAID’s non-emergency FFP programs, focusing on the Graduation approach as an example of applying cost-effectiveness evidence to activity design and how to structure calls for proposals to ensure the greatest impact per taxpayer dollar spent.
What are non-emergency Title II Food for Peace programs?
The US government’s FFP non-emergency Title II programs aim to improve nutrition, food security, and resilience to external shocks for hundreds of thousands of people in chronically food-insecure regions. Targeting the poorest households in vulnerable areas facing recurrent disasters or conflict, they are meant to serve as a transition between short-term emergency food assistance funding and longer-term nutrition and development programs—and ultimately reduce future humanitarian assistance needs. These five-year programs, formerly managed by USAID and called Resilience Food Security Activities (RFSAs), often ran upwards of $150 million.
Following cost-effectiveness evidence: the Graduation approach
In many contexts, the Graduation approach is a cost-effective way to achieve FFP’s non-emergency food security and resilience goals. It helps ultra-poor households overcome multiple drivers of extreme poverty and transition to sustainable livelihoods through a series of coordinated interventions delivered over 18 to 36 months. A broad evidence base—more than 40 randomized impact evaluations in more than 20 countries—demonstrates that graduation programs can be highly cost-effective across settings. Program components can be adapted across countries and contexts while retaining fidelity to the proven model. These consist of:
- Assistance to meet basic needs (such as cash, food, or in-kind inputs) to stabilize consumption until livelihood assistance can generate reliable income
- Encouragement to save via informal savings groups or linkages to financial institutions
- Lump-sum cash or in-kind asset transfers to “jump start” one or more income-generating activities
- Training on technical and psychosocial skills to start or expand a viable livelihood
- Ongoing support and mentoring to individuals or groups of participants
The Graduation approach delivers impact: an evidence review of more than 26 studies in 20 countries finds positive impacts on income (12–60 percent gain), consumption (5–30 percent gain), assets (10–400 percent gain), and savings. Long-term studies find higher consumption and assets for at least four years after the program ends. Twelve studies in 14 countries found improvements in food security (5–52 percent). Graduation programs consistently (though with variance, of course) deliver strong benefits relative to costs, moving households up the socioeconomic ladder with persistent results. Based on the evidence, the World Bank’s Partnership for Economic Inclusion has championed this approach in more than 100 countries.
Evidence and implementation fidelity matter to achieve that impact. USAID had implemented a "lighter touch” model of the Graduation approach with a number of other interventions (“add-ons”) in some recent RFSAs. But these did not have the same impact that a program designed with fidelity to the evidence would be expected to deliver. For example, a randomized evaluation of the lighter-touch SPIR project (2016–2021) in Ethiopia found that the program did not result in any changes in household food security or consumption. Moreover, these versions were more expensive than the proven model: the cost-per-household, estimated from the USAID-funded graduation pilot in Somalia, was $3,200—significantly higher than the $1,250 and $2,500 for which USAID’s OCE estimated an evidence-based graduation program could be delivered in Madagascar and Somalia, respectively.
Program participants deserved better than these high-cost, low-impact programs; applying the evidence showed us how to get there. A 2024 OCE analysis estimated that implementing the evidence-based Graduation approach for three new or redesigned RFSAs would have generated between $11.0 million and $26.4 million in additional household consumption for program participants at no additional cost. That’s a staggering impact on recipients and, thus, on the American taxpayer.
Complexity dilutes impact and raises costs
Program designers tend to think more is better; in the context of the RFSAs, this meant adding more interventions. In addition to core outcomes of increased consumption, food security, and resilience to shocks, USAID activity designers wanted to address community-level resilience, link participants to other services, add water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) interventions, and strengthen markets, among other things. For example, the FIOVANA project (2019–2024) in Madagascar included about 18 different interventions. Each add-on intervention increases programmatic complexity and cost, and unless informed by credible impact evaluation evidence, it's a gamble on whether these add-ons produce the desired results at all. With a fixed budget, each add-on means less money to deliver the program proven to move the program’s target outcome. When considering adding program components, the question should be: how much would it cost to do these extra things, and are we sufficiently convinced that doing so will generate enough impact to justify not delivering the core intervention to more households? Sometimes less is more.
Five lessons for designing FFP programs to lock in cost-effectiveness
USAID’s experience offers lessons on program design that USDA should take to heart: allocate most resources to cost-effective, evidence-based interventions, such as the Graduation approach; emphasize fidelity to core evidence-based program components; consider the trade-offs of add-on interventions; and put technical quality at the top of proposal evaluation criteria.
Baking these lessons into calls for proposals is the first step toward delivering cost-effective, evidence-based RFSAs that achieve impact at scale. Here’s what we worked toward at USAID, and what we’d suggest USDA consider as they write calls for proposals:
- Identify cost-effective interventions that are evidence-based solutions to overcome the specific barriers facing the target population and achieve the activity’s target outcomes. Discuss trade-offs inherent in choosing to include multiple interventions versus focusing the majority of resources on the most cost-effective options.
- Ensure that the entire solicitation—even stock language on organization-wide policies and priorities—delivers a consistent message to applicants: they are expected to deliver the specific intervention(s) identified for inclusion in the activity and to address other policies/issues through those interventions, rather than through add-on interventions.
- Provide clear parameters for contextualization and adaptation within the solicitation itself, and require applicants to provide more detail in their proposals, to reduce the time and expense of post-award refinement at the start of implementation, and to maximize resources spent on delivering the program.
- Develop proposal evaluation criteria that emphasize the fidelity of the proposed technical approach to the evidence base. In addition to increasing the relative weight of the technical approach among the evaluation criteria, write an explanation of each criterion to emphasize key elements of a successful, evidence-based intervention, ensuring that all reviewers prioritize these elements in their review.
- Prioritize the quality of the technical approach, relative to other elements of the solicitation, when scoring proposals. Because scoring criteria determine which proposal succeeds, when reviewers are not familiar with relevant cost-effectiveness evidence, the successful proposal might not be the one most faithful to what evidence indicates is the most effective use of resources. Instead, it is likely to be the proposal that does the best job of mentioning each criterion.
By restarting non-emergency Title II FFP programs, USDA has a tremendous opportunity to continue America’s legacy as a leader in international food security. We suggest prioritizing evidence-based, cost-effective approaches—such as the Graduation approach described here—to maximize the impact of available funds and contribute to durable food security and resilience. If designed with cost-effectiveness evidence at their core, these programs could lift hundreds of thousands of people out of extreme poverty, reduce reliance on humanitarian assistance, and demonstrate the generosity of the American people to our global allies.
