In 2018, USAID/South Africa awarded Panagora a highly competitive task order under the USAID/PPL EVAL ME IDIQ to support its Bilateral Health Office (HO) with “Monitoring, Evaluation, Research and Learning” (MERL) services. Under USAID/South Africa MERL, Panagora operates a vibrant Collaboration and Learning Hub in our Pretoria Office. This hub has been a virtual beehive of activity from which we help the HO to sift through and interpret its vast quantities of data to identify what is working and distill key findings that can guide a more rapid and strategic response. Panagora works to strengthen program implementers, providing targeted support from skilled, experienced experts to apply these findings and scale up promising practices.

Our work on USAID/South Africa MERL prompted the Health Office to expand our services in 2019 under a woman-owned small business sole source contract. Under this contract, USAID/South Africa Technical Support Services (TSS), Panagora is providing highly specialized health technical expertise across USAID/South Africa’s health teams, helping to problem-solve technical priorities and develop creative, innovative solutions to strategically allocate resources, strengthen connections with partners, and replicate best practices and efficient models.

As USAID/South Africa’s Bilateral Office of Health began to identify even more ways Panagora could support its work, they decided to bring all our work under one mechanism and to significantly expand and extend the sole source, TSS. In addition to supporting USAID/South Africa’s bilateral program, we are now also supporting the Regional HIV/AIDS Program which serves Angola, Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, and Namibia. Our resulting contract is just under $29 million and extends our work through to May 2024.  An exciting part of the work is that we support the Mission’s Office of Health to maximize results under their Country Development Cooperation Strategy health development objective, furthering USAID’s Journey to Self-Reliance.