USAID Self-Reliance Learning Agenda
Self-Reliance is a country’s ability to plan, finance, and implement solutions to solve its own development challenges. For countries to achieve this goal, policy-makers and implementers alike will need to understand how to best design and implement policies and programs, foster relationships, and build capacities that support countries on their journeys to self-reliance.
The Self-Reliance Learning Agenda (SRLA) was both a process and a set of products. It generated, collected, synthesized, and disseminated evidence and learning, and facilitated their use to inform USAID’s policies, programs and operations. Complementary work streams built a base of evidence and practice to support USAID’s self-reliance approach.
USAID wanted to understand its contribution to countries’ progress on their journeys to self-reliance at the local, sub-national, national, and regional levels. However, before we measured this contribution to capacity and commitment, USAID first needed to:
- understand how local actors define and understand capacity and commitment; and
- know how local actors, community groups, and other donors are already measuring capacity and commitment.
In this project, the Pulte Institute conducted research that advanced USAID and its user groups’ ability to provide an evidence-based to support journey to self-reliance via methodologies and metrics to help expand and deepen the understanding of how local communities (and other sub-national groups and individuals) defined their own goals, and how they viewed partnerships, progress, development, self-reliance, and evidence.