CLA for A Successful Joint Outreach and Recruitment

The USAID Egyptian Pioneers, launched in November 2022, aims to build a more inclusive and capable Egyptian workforce while contributing to climate goals such as environment and energy. The American University in Cairo (AUC) is administering the program in coordination with the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research (MOHESR). Since its inception, the program has been harmonizing its efforts with current USAID activities to benefit from the knowledge solicited and build on the lessons learned and best practices from these Activities to reach the optimal results.

The program is adopting the Collaborating, Learning, and Adapting (CLA) approach, which is a set of systematic and intentional practices that help improve development effectiveness. The CLA approach for the USAID Egyptian Pioneers incorporates learning and mitigation strategies for all the challenges and risks that may encounter the inclusive recruitment of the first cohort of students from all over Egypt and with all segments of the population represented.

Collaboration between the USAID Egyptian Pioneers and the USAID Scholars Activity was particularly crucial, as both activities will be recruiting scholarship cohorts in 2023 and 2024 and will need to ensure complementary rather than competitive approach. Current undergraduate scholarship activities also maintain close communication and coordination to share lessons learned and synchronize approaches when unexpected challenges arise, including with shared public university partners.

USAID Egyptian Pioneers and USAID Egyptian Scholars Activity are working together to recruit 250 students in joint efforts building on lessons learned from previous cohorts awarded by the USAID Scholars Activity. The outreach campaign and the Online application were launched, and more than 991 applications were received during the first three weeks from across the country. 732 students signed up for the information webinars that were conducted jointly to answer all the inquiries from interested candidates.