Millennium International Consulting, a partner of Millennium Partners, successfully completed a financial assessment of the American University in Bulgaria for USAID under its Segir Financial Services subcontract with DAI.
The project involved a financial audit of the American University and a benchmarking exercise to evaluate its performance against US and other Universities. The Millennium team was led by Jim Bonnell, the former USAID Inspector General for Eurasia. The team defined financial sustainability for the American University in Bulgaria; developed a set of benchmarks to enable USAID and the University to measure the University’s progress towards achieving financial sustainability; assessed where the University currently stands in terms of progress towards achieving the goal of financial sustainability; identified several actions that would assist the University to perform its activities more effectively; and provided an objective third part opinion regarding the University’s management systems.
USAID was able as a result to make a legacy grant of AUBG to Bulgaria as Bulgaria became a full member of the European Union.
The USAID Mission Director Michael Fritz wrote favorably about the project performance in an email to the home office headed by Brian Hannon: “I don’t often feel strongly enough about the performance of an assessment team to comment directly to their head office. Usually I feel that our own staff could have done a better job as they already know the issues and that the assessment team really doesn’t provide any value added. In this case we’ve been exceptionally pleased with the team – they understood clearly the issues that we wanted to explore and provided an extremely valuable document – both to us and to AUBG.”