The Journey to Self-Reliance Amid COVID-19
Even during the pandemic, strengthening a country’s ability to plan, finance, and implement solutions to solve its own development challenges remains as important as ever
As part of the All-of-America response to COVID-19, USAID is working with other U.S. departments and agencies to address the crisis head-on and to plan for the post-COVID-19 landscape. Since the outbreak, USAID has committed more than $1.6 billion in assistance, bringing the U.S. Government funding total to $20.5 billion.
So where does USAID’s Journey to Self-Reliance (J2SR) fit in?
Earlier this year, I outlined this approach, showing how we partner with countries to lead their own development journeys, and described how USAID is operationalizing J2SR. This approach remains central to how the Agency thinks about its COVID-19 response.
USAID’s Policy Framework continues to provide a data-driven and empowering frame to address immediate crises like COVID-19. Responding to and recovering from COVID-19 will still require strengthening a country’s capacity to plan, finance, and implement solutions to solve its own development challenges — including COVID-19 — and ensuring our partners have the commitment to see the work through effectively, inclusively, and with accountability. This is exactly what J2SR is all about.
J2SR is operationalized in three ways: Assessing, Accelerating, and Aligning. Data helps USAID objectively assess need and identify where to act. Accelerating country recovery requires us to work closely with the private sector, while also helping governments better marshal and manage their own resources. And in executing this important COVID-19 response, the Agency continues to make sure our incentives, intervention models, and range of partners remain aligned to the same goal: strengthening country commitment and capacity to respond to the pandemic.
Assessing
Country Roadmaps and secondary metrics: The self-reliance metrics allow USAID and its partners to objectively examine a country’s unique strengths and challenges in addressing COVID-19; this in turn helps guide USAID’s response. In addition to our J2SR metrics, we have a range of internal dashboards that look at everything from up-to-date COVID-19 epidemiological data to the evolving operational capabilities of our Missions on the ground. Data-driven contextual analyses like these can ensure recovery efforts reinforce the commitment and capacity framework of self-reliance, seeking to sustain health and financial gains, prevent democratic backsliding, and rebuild in a way that restores essential public services by strengthening local capacity to respond to future pandemics.
Accelerating
While we see far-reaching negative impacts of COVID-19 that will require unique and targeted interventions, below are a few illustrative examples of accelerating a country’s progress through Financing Self-Reliance and Private-Sector Engagement.
Financing Self-Reliance (FSR): COVID-19 is putting pressure on government spending and their fiscal position while constraining private sector resources. This makes transparent management of public financial resources that much more important, and heightens the need to work effectively with the private sector to leverage their resources to implement sustainable solutions. As an example, in Indonesia USAID will upgrade the national complaint registry system to support an effective COVID-19 response, strengthen procurement transparency, support rapid corruption risk assessments for the Ministry of Health’s Inspector General (IG), and provide Procurement Preparedness for Emergency and Disaster Responses training to the IG.
Private-Sector Engagement: USAID is building on existing partnerships to align with new market realities and adapting programs to identify new market-based solutions. For example, in Ghana we are partnering with local enterprises and factories that normally produce clothing and apparel to pivot to producing masks, medical gowns, and other personal protective equipment. In addition, USAID and the U.S. State Department have launched the COVID-19 Private Sector Engagement and Partnership Fund to strengthen the efforts of the private sector and bolster ongoing response efforts.
Aligning
Redefining our Relationship: Partner governments must remain committed to and capable of delivering citizen-centered, accountable governance and enterprise-driven development. Whether in the emergency response or as we look towards the long-term post-COVID-19 landscape, we are working to ensure the right incentives and accountability mechanisms are in place with our partner governments. In Paraguay, that country’s congress passed $1.6 billion in emergency funding — and concerns on corruption quickly spread. USAID’s International Data & Economic Analysis (IDEA), created to allow USAID staff and partners to access and use country-level data from different third-party sources simultaneously, issued a call for greater government transparency and citizen oversight on the use of the emergency funds in Paraguay. IDEA won a strategic case brought before a civil court, which ordered the public disclosure of asset declarations of all civil servants and vendors engaged in the use of these emergency funds.
Strategic Transitions: The short-term response to COVID-19 looks very different in a more self-reliant country versus one that is less self-reliant. In countries with higher levels of self-reliance, USAID may engage more as a convener and facilitator, leveraging the United States’ convening power to ensure partner countries are able to procure goods and services they need to combat the pathogen. In South Sudan, where self-reliance is very low, the vast majority of our nearly $48 million in COVID-19 support has been used to help the country address immediate COVID-19-related issues in health, water, and emergency food security in humanitarian assistance settings. On the other end of the spectrum, in a more self-reliant country like Georgia, our work is in close partnership with the government in helping prepare their laboratory systems, and supporting technical experts for the country’s response and preparedness activities.
Partnerships
The New Partnerships Initiative (NPI) will increasingly become a backbone to the COVID-19 response. USAID Missions have developed NPI Action Plans that shift USAID toward a more diverse partner base, a focus on local capacity strengthening, and more collaborative approaches to forming partnerships. The Americares Community Partnerships for Respectful Care (CPRC) project is a five-year, $25 million effort under NPI to reduce mortality and morbidity among mothers and their children through improved community-based health care. Americares will work with Christian Connections for International Health (CCIH) and its local affiliates in the United Republic of Tanzania and the Republic of Liberia to leverage the expertise and reach of local and locally established organizations by building their institutional capacity.
The country examples I noted above are only a small flavor of the work we are doing in response to COVID-19. But, they illustrate that J2SR principles remain as critical as ever, even during COVID-19.
About the Author
Chris Maloney is the Assistant to the Administrator at USAID’s Bureau for Policy, Planning and Learning, and serves as the Agency’s lead for the Journey to Self-Reliance strategic pivot. 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.
