The U.S. government’s foreign aid program provides billions of dollars annually in soft loans and grants to developing countries. These funds support innovative and pilot projects in health, education, agriculture, and industry.
Some of these funds are not well spent because of inefficiencies in the process of project hand-off from designers to implementers.
The projects are usually designed by academic and industry experts. After congressional funding, their project plans are handed over to local government agencies for implementation. But these local implementers were not involved in the design process and lacked understanding of the background and rationale for the project design.
For a 16-month period, Terry Schmidt lived in Thailand, working with Royal Thai Government agencies in training project staff responsible for U.S. funded projects. He developed Rapid Action Planning (RAP) which would efficiently build integrated teams by “recreating” the project plan to reflect both original intent and on-the-ground reality.
The innovative methods have been adopted and endorsed by various agencies worldwide, and were documented in a World Bank Report. Our leading edge process derives from this action research.