Can anyone identify  anyone ...

Can anyone identify  anyone at any NGO's who employ people with the backgrounds in hard sciences, physics, and invention to be qualified to understand what it is they are procuring? There must be some people who fit that description, but, they seem well hidden.  For example, the procurement officer at USAID has a liberal arts decree. What can people like this possibly know about that they are buying?  Water technologies tend to be older than the alphabet, and understanding these are not rocket science.  There is a tendency to purchase name brand and long standing technologies that do not work for the application at hand, not without heroic methods, and which are poorly supported by R&D.  Really this is a governance problem.