Marie Helene Dos Santos

Marie Helene Dos Santos serves as a key procurement professional within USAID/Senegal, supporting the agency’s mission to advance sustainable development across West Africa through strategic acquisition of technical assistance and capacity-building services. She manages a diverse portfolio of contracts aligned with governance, public health, education, climate resilience, and humanitarian response initiatives, ensuring that procurements adhere to U.S. foreign assistance guidelines and international best practices. Her work centers on securing expert personnel, institutional strengthening services, and implementation support from qualified entities capable of delivering high-impact, locally adapted solutions in complex operational environments. Dos Santos cultivates collaborative relationships with a broad spectrum of international and local implementers, including multilateral organizations, U.S.-based technical firms, and regional NGOs with proven track records in development programming. She prioritizes vendors with deep contextual expertise in Senegal and the Sahel region, fostering partnerships that emphasize sustainability, local ownership, and adaptive management. Her contracting approach emphasizes performance-based outcomes, requiring robust monitoring and evaluation frameworks as core contract deliverables. Her procurement activity reflects a strong preference for open, non-set-aside competitions, with 100% of acquisitions conducted under full and open competition without socioeconomic set-asides. This approach underscores a focus on technical merit, institutional capacity, and programmatic alignment over socioeconomic classification, while still encouraging broad market participation from qualified domestic and international firms. Dos Santos specializes in procuring services under NAICS categories related to management consulting, technical assistance, institutional capacity building, and public health program implementation. Her portfolio frequently includes contracts for training, data systems development, policy advisory services, and resilience-building interventions, reflecting deep expertise in development programming and donor-funded project execution. She consistently engages vendors with demonstrated success in complex, multi-stakeholder environments across fragile and emerging economies.