Contingency Plan for USAID AGRO Activity In Ukraine

On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a brutal, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. The USAID Agriculture Growing Rural Opportunities (AGRO) Activity, which was not designed to carry out programming during a war, managed to tailor its interventions promptly and effectively to the new context using collaborating, learning, and adapting (CLA) tools of scenario planning and adaptive management. The AGRO team used scenario planning ahead of the Russian invasion to prepare for how activities and the project approach would change. Adaptive management tools helped AGRO to ensure the safety of staff and beneficiaries and then build off its worst-case scenario to pivot focus from supporting agricultural markets to prioritizing farmers’ and rural communities’ immediate needs.

Within about a month, ARGO had expanded the Activity’s geography and target value chains, launched programs to help agricultural enterprises relocate to safer areas, facilitated supply chain and logistics recovery, began finding new markets for agricultural producers, and collaborating with local and international stakeholders to document damage from the war.