USAID Knowledge Rescue

Preserve USAID’s Knowledge and Evidence For Public Use

Beginning in February of 2025, the work of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was stopped by an executive order, with the Agency ultimately shuttered, staff fired and dispersed, and websites eliminated. Consequently, 63 years of experience and learning were removed from the public domain, leaving a huge gap in the evidence and knowledge base that has guided institutions around the world in providing effective support to developing countries. To make sure this knowledge won’t be lost forever, a small but mighty group of volunteers and a few paid technical experts have been working since then to restore these taxpayer-funded resources and return them to the public where they belong.

With your help, we are preserving files and interviewing staff to ensure this essential knowledge and evidence remain available to other organizations still working in development, and to inform discussions about future development efforts. With more than 250,000 digital files preserved and 300 planned individual and group interviews, the knowledge at stake is vast and valuable. Your financial sponsorship will cover the costs of hosting these resources in the public domain, mining them for crucial lessons, and enabling development practitioners and policy makers to engage with this knowledge base and with each other in a sustainable knowledge sharing forum.

Plans for the coming year:

• Make available/searchable >250,000 digital research and evaluation files
• Interview 300 former USAID staff to capture their learned experience
• Establish sensemaking processes to synthesize lessons learned and share them with practitioners and policymakers
• Engage stakeholders in planning for a sustainable future for keeping this knowledge in the public domain

Funds are needed for:

• Digital infrastructure to curate and republish rescued knowledge
• Subscription fees for cloud hosting services
• Stakeholder convenings
• Intern(s) to handle daily workflows
• Modest honoraria for some of the key technical experts (who have already contributed 1000s of hours of volunteer time to this effort) to maintain the digital infrastructure

Any amount helps. Together, we can ensure that this knowledge informs the community of dedicated professionals worldwide who continue to advance development globally and who are planning for the future of international development and humanitarian assistance.

Use this tool to stay in touch or share unclassified resources with our team. In the coming year, we plan to hold 300 interviews and make over 270,000 digital resources available and searchable. And if you wish to be interviewed, please sign up here!