Every year Bid Boss supports a number of clients in their applications in response to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food for Progress and McGovern-Dole Food for Education program solicitations with strategic advising, proposal writing, proposal management, and cost proposal support. This year we also wanted to extend a little public support in hopes that we can share a little advice with those of you who may be completely new to USDA.
USDA is a notoriously challenging funder for new applicants. The programs are usually appealing, always drawing lots of interest from those organizations working in agriculture, nutrition, and food security during their annual call for proposals. When the country lists are released each year new potential USDA applicants are often excited to hear about an untapped funder. However, USDA is not easy. The programs are highly competitive and have intense operational considerations which make designing, winning, and implementing a USDA program unlike any other funder.
Fortunately, throughout the live solicitation period, they do this lovely thing where they accept questions on a rolling basis (due every Friday!) and respond to them throughout the proposal process.
HOWEVER, by the nature of their role as the stewards of the U.S. government procurement process, the USDA staff writing the responses to questions are somewhat constrained by what they can and can't say.
For example - they can't say "if you asked this question you may be about two months behind your competition."
But we can. 😉
So feel free to hop over to grants.gov and check out USDA's responses provided by USDA on grants.gov. Then come back here and check out a few of our alternative answers to a few of the questions which which asked during the first round of Q&A responses and in their public webinar on May 21.
Will USDA consider proposals for countries other than the priority countries listed?
USDA's answer reiterates that these are the prioritized countries, and USDA reserves the right to make additional awards if they want to. For the 2024 round of applications, Food for Progress prioritized Benin, Cambodia, Madagascar, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and Tunisia, while Food for Education prioritized Angola, Bangladesh, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Guinea-Bissau, Laos, Malawi, and Rwanda. These country lists were released on the USDA website more than one month before the solicitations went live.
What USDA can't say: Neither USDA Food for Progress nor Food for Education has made an award to a non-prioritized country within the last ten years.
To us, that's a very very strong indicator that preparing an application for a country not included on the priority list would not be a way we would recommend your organization use precious resources. We'd forecast the potential likelihood of success at less than 2%.
While technically USDA can and may review applications outside of the listed countries, they have made their selection with a lot of thought and consideration.
If our organization never managed this amount of fund or this size of project in the past, does it make us ineligible?
And the semi-related question: Can cooperative farmers groups in Uganda also apply for funding support?
USDA's answer reiterates where to find the application eligibility criteria, which is really helpful. That is always a guidepost for what they are looking for in applications. The answer you get there is that not managing an award of similar size does not make an applicant ineligible, but it may make you less competitive. It also shares that applications are accepted from a range of entities, including locally run organizations.
What USDA can't say: We are very unlikely to make an award to an entity which does not have demonstrated ability to manage the monetization process and resulting program.
We won't say straight out that USDA plays favorites, but check out the list of active Food for Progress and McGovern-Dole and you'll see that the implementing partners are often the same players year after year.
You might be saying "why? isn't the US government interested in working with new partners and with local partners in particular?" Sure, if we're talking about USAID. But USDA is a different beast.
Not only is USDA a completely separate department of the US government, but they have their own concerns. The primary purpose of USDA programs is to find something productive to do with agricultural commodities purchased from US farmers. Ag subsidies in action!
The Food for Progress and McGovern-Dole Food for Education programs face intense congressional oversight and scrutiny, in part because they are funded through the highly scrutinized Farm Bill. (This is also part of why they experience delays, as sometimes the Farm Bill is... contentious.)
USDA's Foreign Agriculture Service aims to ensure that Congress is happy with what they are doing and US farmers are happy with what they are doing. The primary things which USDA seems to care about when evaluating prospective partners are:
- Experience in monetizing agriculture commodities using an experienced monetization agent.
- Experience managing USDA funds or other programs of similar technical scope.
- Deep understanding of value chains and agricultural market systems.
USDA is less concerned with some things that USAID often is - for example, in country experience is less often to be a deal breaker.
Breaking into this space requires a good amount of strategic work and already having demonstrated experience with similar size awards would be key piece of that equation!
USDA states that each activity budget should be detailed in a separate tab, the totals of which align with the budget summary tab. In this case, does “activity” refer to components or individual activities?
With an example for a bit more context: If we have 5 activities per component, should we build 20 (+M&E activities) tabs or should we create 4 tabs for each component and group all component sub-activities under the same tab?
USDA helpfully stated that project "activities" could be grouped into "components," which we think is enough information to clarify that smaller activities can be grouped together under one larger "activity."
What USDA can't say: Oh lord, please don't submit a budget with twenty activities!
In our experience over more than ten years, USDA appreciates a streamlined budget. Their project management software (the dreaded FAIS) is set up to manage activity-based budgets and applicants are required to manage to that activity-based budget.
If you are proposing 20 activities, you're going to make managing the budget during implementation incredibly difficult! Instead, group your activities into categories or "components" and have activity tabs in your budget for each of those larger categories. These should be labelled as "activities" for the purposes of USDA proposals, even if that's not how you would typically describe them.
A quick word of caution! USDA has a history of making awards with a request to cut one or more activities from the application's budget. Some strategic presentation can help you make sure your project doesn't fall apart should cutting one activity be required.
Can USDA clarify if in addition to the Chief of Party other positions need to be named for other key personnel?
USDA's response clarifies that the applicant should identify which positions are key personnel in the organizational chart and that you are only allowed to submit the CV for the Chief of Party.
What USDA can't say: We actually have some pretty specific key personnel in mind, but we stopped writing it into the solicitation a few years ago.
USDA has what we would call "ghost guidance" in which a specific term is used which carried a specific meaning in a previous year, but is no longer defined as clearly as it once was. (The concept of "lasting impact" is another of these hangers on.)
As a more concrete answer, USDA proposals have historically had three key personnel:
- Chief of Party (or project director), preferably with substantial USDA project management experience
- Finance Director, ideally with USDA project experience, but definitely experience managing program income and activity-based budgets
- Monitoring and Evaluation Director, who can manage an external evaluation, maybe an impact evaluation and some special studies
We typically recommend including those three roles as named key personnel in the proposal, if possible. Some organizations may also include to designate a technical lead as key personnel, depending on whether the Chief of Party also has an appropriate technical skillset and what the needs of the program would be.
Would it be my company that would need to make arrangements for a crew to offload or will there be a crew in place?
This question is related to the process of monetization. For those who are not familiar, this is a central process for how USDA Food for Progress proposals are funded. Applicants must "monetize" (aka "sell") commodities (aka agricultural products, usually soy, soybean meal, wheat, etc.) which have been purchased from U.S. farmers to the destination country. For example, a project may take 200,000 metric tons of wheat to sell in Cambodia. The funds from that sale will then be used to fund project activities.
USDA answered this question in a straightforward way, by directing applicants back to the monetization guidance.
What USDA can't say: This question is missing a key piece of how the monetization process ought to work.
For Food for Progress projects, your organization should work with an experienced monetization agent to arrange the transportation, sale, and management of the commodities for sale. There are several private firms who provide this service and have demonstrated track records managing the sale process on behalf of implementing organizations. We are happy to provide referrals to experienced agents for new USDA applicants.
For Food for Education proposals, monetization isn't the name of the game. There, you would be taking commodity from US farmers or local/regional farmers (that is called "Local and Regional Procurement" or LRP) and using those commodities are part of a larger school meal program. Totally different process, definitely requiring more logistically support.
What is the maximum amount of CCC cash available per project?
Ahhh, CCC cash. An important consideration! In USDA budgets, your organization must wait to begin activities until the monetization has been completed (or started, if you're planning to do multiple "tranches" or shipments). Depending on your monetization agent and shipping process, this may take between 6-12 months to complete.
USDA gave an entirely correct and complete answer to this question: The total budget available for commodities, transportation, and CCC are included in the country guidance.
CCC cash is the funding that USDA has to provide to start-up the project before monetization is completed. This is typically used to fund:
- Bare bones staffing. Your chief of party, finance director, and monitoring and evaluation lead are usually the key staff that get to start before activities begin.
- Assessments. Your baseline, rapid market assessments, and gender/social inclusion analysis, if needed, will have to be covered by CCC cash.
- Basic start-up operations expenses. This may include costs for getting registered in country, setting up an office, hosting a stakeholder meeting of some kind, etc.
- Costs of monetization. This is the primary function of the project at this stage, so make sure any project costs related to monetization are included during the start-up stage.
This is important to consider when budgeting. USDA has a limited amount of total funds available, usually between $1-1.5 million, so you need to operate within that shoestring budget for that first year. Keep in mind that you won't have activities going on, so many costs will be limited during that start-up period. For example, most technical staff don't need to be budgeted until month 9 or 10 in year one.
USDA Food for Progress proposals are a unique beast. They are a funder unlike others within the US government and have significant operating considerations and constraints which are important to understand.
Have more questions? Join the Clubhouse and post your question and we can share some thoughts!
