Five interrelated core values constitute the basic organizational precepts that define what USAID is and what it stands for.

Managing for Results: USAID manages for results through a customer-driven, results-oriented strategic planning and performance measurement approach. This means setting clear objectives and targets, collecting adequate information to measure progress, and adjusting strategies and tactics as required, all in consultation with customers.

Customer Focus: USAID, more consistently and systematically, involves both partners and customers in strategic planning and performance measurement.

Teamwork and Participation: USAID forms Strategic Objective Teams committed to the achievement of customer-focused results for which team members hold themselves individually and collectively accountable. USAID seeks the active participation of customers, partners, and stakeholders in order to improve the quality of decisions and ensure the support needed to succeed. Participation is based on joint planning.

Empowerment and Accountability: USAID invests its Strategic Objective Teams with authority to make and implement decisions that will produce results and with accountability for such decisions.

Valuing Diversity: USAID seeks to take into account the Diversity of views, experience, skills, capabilities, and beliefs of those around us.

Basic Business Model - Maximal Use of Public-Private Alliances

It is Agency policy to work more closely with other traditional and non-traditional development actors in public-private alliances characterized by the following features: a shared understanding of the development problem or issue; a shared belief that an alliance will be more effective than any approach taken by a single actor; a shared commitment of resources; and perhaps, most important, a willingness to share risks.

USAID guidance calls for Operating Units to consider the applicability of public-private alliances and seek practical ways to involve alliance partners in relevant aspects of Agency planning, achieving and learning processes. In some cases, entire Strategic Objectives (SOs) may be framed in the form of public-private alliances; in other cases, alliances are relevant in the case of individual Intermediate Results (IRs), but not for the SO as a whole; in most cases, public-private alliances will operate at the sub-IR level.