How the Journey to Self-Reliance is Changing the Way USAID Works
Supporting our partner countries to lead their own development journeys
For nearly two years, USAID has been reorienting its strategies, partnership models, and program practices to achieve greater development outcomes, and work toward a time when foreign assistance is no longer necessary. We call it the Journey to Self-Reliance.
Why is this important? If USAID is not constantly thinking about ending the need for foreign assistance in a given country — that is, making the country more self-reliant — it is not maximizing taxpayer resources here in the United States, and worse, it is exacerbating the problem of donor dependency.
Central to the Journey to Self-Reliance are the concepts of capacity and commitment. For USAID, self-reliance entails a country’s capacity to plan, finance, and implement solutions to local development challenges, and a commitment to see the work through effectively, inclusively, and with accountability.
What are the components to Self-Reliance?
The Journey to Self-Reliance’s main components can be described by “the three A’s:”
- ASSESS: Use data to understand where a country sits on the Journey to Self-Reliance.
- ACCELERATE: Focus on approaches that move the country forward on its journey.
- ALIGN: Ensure both USAID and our partner countries understand and are committed to moving along that journey.
ASSESS is driven by our Country Roadmaps, USAID’s standardized analytical tool for gauging overall country progress across the dimensions of commitment and capacity, and therefore, its level of self-reliance. They are based on 17 third-party, publicly available metrics that serve as entry points for discussions about what is helping and hindering a country’s journey.
Once we assess where a country is on its journey, we need to use all the levers at our disposal to ACCELERATE their progress. Two components are central to how we accelerate a country’s journey:
- Financing Self-Reliance is about helping countries more effectively mobilize and manage their resources, both public and private.
- Private-Sector Engagement deepens our collaboration with private-sector partners across all areas of our work, and helps ensure long-term, sustainable outcomes.
Finally, after assessing and accelerating a country’s journey, we also need to ensure USAID and our partner countries are ALIGNED to the goals of this new approach. Three initiatives are helping us do that:
- Redefining our Relationship is an effort to better incentivize commitment from partner governments while building their capacity through increased use of tools — when appropriate — such as policy reform, cost-sharing, and use of government systems. Redefining our Relationship also takes a fresh look at how we can improve donor coordination.
- Strategic Transitions is about evolving our partnerships when a country achieves an advanced level of self-reliance. This is not to say that every development problem has been solved, but USAID must rethink how to work in that country to focus on its key remaining challenges, sustain development gains to date, and move beyond a traditional donor-recipient model.
- USAID’s first-ever Acquisition and Assistance Strategy allows us to be more flexible, adaptable, and creative as we work with our partners to design and deliver impactful initiatives. In addition, the related New Partnerships Initiative allows USAID to work with a more diverse range of partners, including local organizations in partner countries.
What’s next in the Journey to Self Reliance?
By the end of 2020, we anticipate that all of USAID’s Missions will have revised their Country Development Cooperation Strategies to capture how USAID will promote self-reliance in each partner country. These new strategies will be posted publicly on USAID’s website and will serve as the guiding document for all of the Missions’ activities.
About the Author
Chris Maloney is the Acting Assistant Administrator in USAID’s Bureau for Africa, and the Agency’s lead for the Journey to Self-Reliance strategic pivot. As the former Assistant to the Administrator in the Bureau for Policy, Planning and Learning, he has helped shape USAID’s development policy, provided strategy and programming guidance, strengthened the Agency’s capacity to build and use evidence, and facilitated engagement with bilateral and multilateral organizations.
