Salome Bamaka-Safi

Salome Bamaka-Safi serves as an Acquisition & Assistance Specialist at the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Kenya Mission, where she plays a pivotal role in executing complex procurement and assistance strategies aligned with U.S. development objectives in East Africa. Responsible for designing and managing competitive acquisition instruments, she supports mission-critical programs in governance, public health, economic resilience, and social behavior change. Her work centers on procuring technical services that enable locally led solutions, ensuring compliance with federal acquisition regulations while fostering adaptive, context-sensitive interventions. She routinely handles performance-based service contracts, cooperative agreements, and task orders requiring high levels of analytical and operational expertise. Bamaka-Safi collaborates with a diverse ecosystem of international and local consulting firms, implementation partners, and technical service providers specializing in development programming. While no single contractor dominates her portfolio, she consistently engages firms with proven capacity in institutional strengthening, monitoring and evaluation, and systems-level support services. Her contracting patterns reflect a preference for agile, performance-driven partnerships that emphasize adaptability, local ownership, and cross-sector coordination, often requiring multi-disciplinary teams with deep regional expertise. Her procurement activity shows no reliance on socioeconomic set-asides, with 100% of her acquisitions conducted under full and open competition. This reflects a strategic alignment with USAID’s emphasis on technical merit, program impact, and scalability over socioeconomic preferences, though she remains committed to equitable access and transparent processes that enable broad participation from qualified vendors, including small businesses, without formal set-aside mechanisms. Her primary procurement focus lies in NAICS 541618 (Other Management Consulting Services) and 561990 (All Other Support Services), indicating a strong emphasis on strategic advisory, program design, monitoring and evaluation, and operational support services. She frequently procures technical assistance for governance reform, health system strengthening, and resilience-building initiatives, requiring deep domain expertise in development economics, behavioral science, and institutional capacity development.