Attachment J.19 REGIONAL INTEGRATION STRATEGY TWO PAGER.pdf

As part of the implementation of its Country Development Cooperation Strategy 2020-2021, USAID/ Colombia has developed a Regional Integration Strategy (RIS) in order to deepen the regional impacts of its activities and enhance overall country development outcomes.

The RIS rests on five pillars:

1. Inter and intra-regional collaboration: The objective is to ensure a constant and collaborative exchange of information and work-flow, either among the activities and stakeholders within the regions (intra-regional) or among stakeholders from different regions and national policy makers (inter-regional). Collaboration and information exchange, in turn, allow the different stakeholders to complement and learn from each other, while giving USAID/Colombia the opportunity to leverage the funding and comparative abilities of the stakeholders involved and thus maximize regional development impacts.

USAID and IPs leverage funding and comparative abilities based on information and work-flow exchanged with regional stakeholders to maximize regional development impacts

Regional Integration Strategy (RIS)

2. Target monitoring: This is a process aimed at tracking the Mission’s basket of strategic targets (i.e., a set of outcome goals aligned to the CDCS overall goal, Development Objectives and cross-cutting priorities) to understand and follow-up the Agency’s regional development impacts.

Mission Staff, Partners, and resources aligned toward a common set of strategic outcomes

3. Organized and sequential programming: The objective of this process is to develop and follow a strategic work plan for implementing concurrent or sequential activities. This pillar is informed by the two previous ones while supporting the coordination pillar through improved communication with counterparts and defined roles and responsibilities.

Formalized agreements among IPs and clearly defined roles in joint interventions

4. Evidence-based adaptive management: This refers to the Mission’s ability to generate feedback on its regional-level performance and use it to engage stakeholders and adapt country programming in order to bolster USAID/Colombia’s contribution to Colombia’s development outcomes. Evidence will be collected from the target-monitoring pillar, portfolio reviews, regional theories of change, evaluations and impact assessments to inform strategic regional planning decisions (including resource allocation, types of intervention and prioritization).

Feedback on regional-level performance gathered and used to engage stakeholders and adapt programming

5. Geographic focus: The Regional Integration Strategy will initially focus on five identified priority areas - Catatumbo, Bajo Cauca Antioqueño, Pacífico Nariño, Caquetá-Guaviare and Bogota.

This prioritization does not exclude other opportunities for the integration of activities that may deepen USAID/Colombia’s regional impacts.

Actions and resources concentrated in a narrower geography to maximize regional development impacts

- RIS deployment will be done in phases

Implementation: The Regional Integration Team, made up of the Mission’s Chief Advisor and two Regional Advisors, will oversee the RIS design and implementation.