The United States Agency for International Development’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (USAID/BHA) is exploring innovative solutions that allow for the tagging, tracking, locating, and monitoring of food and non-food items (NFIs) through the international humanitarian supply chain.

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Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) seeks opportunities to co-create, co-design, co-invest, and collaborate in the research, development, piloting, testing, and scaling of innovative, scalable, and cost-effective remote sensing solutions for our global supply chain.

The application(s) to be implemented will enable our organization to:
Capture data and establish baseline parameters such as temperature, humidity, moisture, tilt, and shock on humanitarian commodities as they are shipped around the world.

Monitoring of other elements that have the potential to impact the quality and safety of commodities are also of interest; Improve visibility into the location, condition, and quality of humanitarian commodities as they are shipped around the world; Reduce waste, loss, damage, risk, and inefficiencies through access to timely, valuable, and quantifiable data, analytical insights, dashboards, and reporting; and Improve the operational oversight and the ability to make information available to stakeholders, including receivers of commodities, U. S. Government (USG) and private sector partners, and donor governments.

Any awards issued under this Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) will be for Applied Research or Development, as those terms are defined in 48 USC 3 5. 001, as follows:
“Applied research” means the effort that:
(a) normally follows basic research, but may not be severable from the related basic research; (b) attempts to determine and exploit the potential of scientific discoveries or improvements in technology, materials, processes, methods, devices, or techniques; and (c) attempts to advance the state of the art.

When being used by contractors in cost principle applications, this term does not include efforts whose principal aim is the design, development, or testing of specific items or services to be considered for sale; these efforts are within the definition of “development,” given below.

“Development” means the systematic use of scientific and technical knowledge in the design, development, testing, or evaluation of a potential new product or service (or of an improvement in an existing product or service) to meet specific performance requirements or objectives.

It includes the functions of design engineering, prototyping, and engineering testing; it excludes subcontracted technical effort that is for the sole purpose of developing an additional source for an existing product.