Scenario Planning for Assistance to Yemen

Organizational Challenge: Following the US government’s withdrawal from Yemen in 2015, USAID placed most development projects on full suspension. In the meantime, USAID/Yemen started piloting a small number of high-impact, early recovery assistance activities. To ensure USAID is implementing responsive and effective programming in this complex environment, USAID/Yemen, through a collaborative interagency process and in consultation with implementing partners, developed a plan for how it will invest in non-humanitarian activities under five “scenarios” that, in USAID’s judgment, are likely to unfold over the next 18 months.

CLA Approach:

• Scenario Planning: USAID/Yemen used a facilitated process to launch the scenario planning process in January 2017. The team started to craft its scenario plan and corresponding programming approaches by first brainstorming risks, opportunities, challenges and course-changing events to identify potential trajectories across political, economic, security and humanitarian themes.
• M&E for Learning: Under each scenario, USAID identified an effective and viable assistance approach. The team developed a monitoring framework with indicators that allow them to quickly identify shifts across scenarios, update the assistance approach, and refine the plan itself.
• Adaptive Management: Using these scenarios as an operational management tool will enable USAID to shift the appropriate assistance as needs emerge. This scenario plan has also provided the team with an analytical framework through which they can understand the rapidly changing events on the ground and their implications for USAID assistance.

Outcomes: A significant impact of the scenario planning process is that USAID has established clear ownership of the development program within the US government interagency structure. By collaborating early with key stakeholders, the Yemen team was able to lead the programming discussion while building cross-agency support for the approach. This approach will allow the team to build a coherent program that is less vulnerable to ad-hoc programming requests, improving long-term development outcomes.

Read the full case here.

This blog post is part of a series featuring the 10 winners of the 2017 Collaborating, Learning and Adapting Case Competition. A new case will be posted on USAID Learning Lab each Thursday: October 12 - December 14.