Since becoming an independent nation in 1962, Uganda has struggled with high rates of poverty, regional and international conflict, and both endemic and epidemic disease outbreaks, particularly HIV/AIDS. In recent years, though, it has become a key partner of the United States. The U.S. government provides foreign assistance to improve the lives of Ugandans but also to advance stability in the East Africa region generally, with the bulk of these programs administered by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

In a country beset by significant long-term challenges such as rapid population growth, autocratic governance, and recurring food insecurity, how can USAID better ensure its programs bring about positive, sustained change? One way is to introduce scenario planning.

Strategic Planning and Futures Analysis at USAID

Even under the best conditions, the transformation of a “developing” country to a “developed” one takes decades. South Korea, one of USAID’s earliest recipient countries and an oft-cited shining example of the impact of foreign assistance, went from being poorer than Mozambique on a per-capita basis to wealthier than Spain in the span of about 40 years. How countries develop is neither a certain nor linear process; nor does it occur overnight.

Recognizing that development takes time, USAID in recent years has moved toward creating country-level strategic frameworks with long time horizons. These Country Development Cooperation Strategies are five-year plans developed in close collaboration with our bilateral partners. The longer-term outlook, however, presents a different sort of challenge: how to stay abreast of fast-paced changes in the development landscape such as rising political instability, rapid rates of urbanization, and a flurry of technology breakthroughs like digital finance and precision agriculture.

To better understand how changes may affect our projections, USAID is banking more and more on the use of futures analysis techniques, such as scenario planning, to develop several plausible country trajectories, not just one. Scenario planning helps field staff and development stakeholders construct plausible 5- to 10-year scenarios to consider strategic risks and opportunities. An idea called “quantitative trend modeling” is also gaining agency traction by bringing together historical data and sophisticated forecasting models to explore not only how trends may play out individually, but how shifts in one trend could ripple across others.

The International Futures Model

In 2014, USAID’s Uganda Mission was in the initial stages of developing its next Country Development Cooperation Strategy. As they began the process, mission staff worked with USAID’s Global Development Lab to find data-driven approaches to help them through it.

One particularly promising tool was a quantitative trend analysis model developed by the Pardee Center for International Futures at the University of Denver. The International Futures Model, as it is called, combines state-of-the-art modeling and forecasting techniques with over 3,000 historic data series, covering nearly every country receiving USAID assistance. The power of the International Futures Model lies not just in its ability to forecast, but to test assumptions and examine multiple scenarios at the same time. It is highly interactive. For example, the model can help us understand what would likely happen to agricultural productivity, malnutrition rates, and the gross domestic product if an extended drought depressed farming output, or if a country and its international partners made concerted investments to improve secondary education over the next decade.

With the support of the Global Development Lab, USAID Uganda partnered with the Pardee Center to explore the most critical trends facing the country over the next 5 to 25 years. The result of this partnership was an independent report that laid out several forecasts of the “baseline” trends in demographics, education, economics, agriculture, and other sectors, as well as the potential effects of development interventions across each of them.

Perhaps the most pressing issue uncovered by the exercise is Uganda’s high fertility rate. Currently, the average fertility is nearly six children per woman, compared to a global average of just over two. For a country about the size of the state of Oregon but with 10 times the population (estimated at 40.3 million in 2016), such rapid population growth is placing a massive strain on physical and social systems. Moreover, any feasible development intervention – whether in education, water and sanitation, agriculture, etc. – can be seriously eroded in just a few short years by such growth.

New Guidance

As with all applications of futures analysis, the model and resulting report serve as a thinking tool, not a prediction machine. The International Futures Model is meant to facilitate data-driven explorations of current trends and “what-ifs,” assessing the magnitude of potential development interventions given what we know about historical correlations between socioeconomic systems.

As USAID Mission Director in Uganda Mark Meassick put it, “The International Futures Model gave us the evidence we needed to see future trends and learn what we could do to change their trajectory to better the lives of more Ugandans.”

But the analysis revealed a powerful conclusion. Integrated interventions – those aimed at both reducing fertility rates (most directly by improving access to voluntary family planning, as well as strengthening education and employment for women and girls), while simultaneously building capacity to meet citizens’ basic needs – are the only way to produce positive, significant, and sustainable development impacts in the long term.

As noted earlier, international development is a long-term process with impacts that may take years or even decades to manifest themselves. Similarly, the full impact of new approaches to strategic planning for development may take a long time to come to fruition. However, early indications suggest that using quantitative trend modeling to conduct analysis for USAID Missions can produce very useful results. Missions in Ethiopia and Southern Africa are now benefitting from the same model. Trends analysis, along with scenario planning, may soon become indispensable tools to developing the next generation of country development strategies.