In April 2020, USAID launched the Digital Strategy, charting an Agency-wide vision for development and humanitarian assistance in the world’s rapidly evolving digital landscape. It set a path to equip the USAID workforce, empower partners, and shape effective programming that supports partner countries on their digital transformation journeys.
The Strategy reinforced USAID’s deliberate and holistic commitment to improve development and humanitarian assistance outcomes through the use of digital technologies to strengthen open, inclusive, secure, and rights-respecting digital ecosystems.
Draft USAID Digital Policy
The Digital Policy aims to prepare USAID and its partners around the world to keep pace with rapid change, adopt digital technologies responsibly, embrace democratic values, bolster information integrity and resilience, engage in strategic competition to counter authoritarianism, and decisively accelerate development progress and humanitarian response using digital technologies.
The ubiquitous, networked, artificially-intelligent technologies of tomorrow will require us to adapt our ways of working and acting in the world. At the same time, the core concerns of digital development will remain unchanged: bridging inequities, broadening inclusion, protecting human rights, and safeguarding human dignity through the incorporation of sound data governance and cybersecurity practices in an era of digital transformation.
As such, the Digital Policy will pursue three key goals:
- BUILD: Propel development and humanitarian outcomes through an infrastructural approach to digital technology and services.
- TRANSFORM: Evolve USAID’s digital approach through proactive improvement of our
knowledge, skills, policies, and technology. - PROTECT: Promote safety, security, and fairness in USAID programming and across the broader digital context.
Give Your Feedback to USAID
The USAID Digital Policy is open for public comment until close of business (5:00 p.m. Eastern Time) on June 7, 2024. Reviewers are welcome to submit comments individually or work with their organizations to submit comments collectively. You can only give comments via the USAID website to shape the next ten years of digital development and build a digital future that benefits all.
USAID welcomes your feedback especially on the following:
- Major omissions or inaccuracies
- Sections or statements that you strongly support and feel must be included in the Digital Policy
- Sections or statements which should be clarified
Observe the following recommendations to facilitate the process of reviewing and addressing a large volume of feedback.
- Be as specific as possible in your comments and, as relevant, reference page numbers and other identifying details (such as subsection, diagram, and call-out box, among others).
- Focus your comments on the relevant highest priority recommendations and issues.
- Provide concrete suggestions on how to address, resolve, and clarify the issues, questions, or concerns you raise.
- Enter your comments on the specific sections of the Digital Policy in the provided comment boxes.
- Submit comments in English, if feasible, as they cannot guarantee that they will be able to review comments submitted in other languages.
Please note that this USAID Digital Policy will be professionally edited for style and readability before publication, hence stylistic or phrasing edits are not requested during this public comment period.
As a registered and experienced innovations consultancy entrepreneur, I am hereby proposing that in its ambitious and timely quest to pursue its 3 key Digital Policy goals:
1. To Build
2. To Transform
3. To Protect
The USAID considers established a specialized and dedicated component called, for example, the USAID Digital Development Hub (USAID-DC).