Every four to eight years, a new U.S. administration comes to power and believes it needs to clean house of all previous ideas and initiatives. That would be a mistake when it comes to American foreign aid policy.
Fortunately, the Biden administration has already embraced several key foreign aid policies from the previous administration, such as our approach to China, the plan to distribute COVID-19 vaccines internationally, and the U.S. Agency for International Development’s organizational reforms. I hope they don’t abandon USAID’s guiding principle, called the Journey to Self-Reliance, or J2SR, which places development outcomes ahead of newspaper headlines.
Throughout the world, donor governments struggle with how to focus on sustainable development outcomes, with the constant political pressure to advance specific, special interests or launch a new initiative geared to garner news headlines worldwide. This pulls away time, attention, and resources from ultimately achieving sustainable results.
In the United States, we addressed this problem with a bipartisan effort of political leaders, career development and foreign service officers, and external international development experts. They worked together to create a unifying vision — J2SR — that placed good development policy at the forefront of USAID’s foreign aid.
J2SR is not an initiative, but a nearly four-year-old multi-pronged approach. Its focus is on ensuring that foreign aid dollars will be spent helping countries free themselves from the need for assistance — a goal developing countries see as a path to freedom and prosperity.
It’s [J2SR] empowering societies and governments to provide for the needs of their people. … it’s how we should invest our foreign aid to achieve real results.
—And while this process may take decades, all nation-states want strong economies and institutions; they don’t want to depend upon another nation’s generosity. That’s not what we want — and it’s not what they want. The U.S. and our partner countries should seek one objective: strategically help countries progress past the need for foreign assistance. Dependency is not an acceptable development outcome.
This concept of focusing on sustainable development outcomes is not new and forms the basis of the Sustainable Development Goals, which were adopted by 193 countries. Goals on their own, however, do not achieve results. J2SR takes it a step further by focusing on metrics, strategy, budgets, and performance to operationalize sustainable development.
This approach might not be as attention-grabbing as the next grand initiative. Still, it is what the best practice of international development looks like.
Here’s how J2SR works:
• First, USAID uses data to assess a country’s development journey objectively through the annually produced Country Roadmaps plot, where a country sits on the development spectrum that identifies each country’s development strengths and weaknesses.
• USAID then looks for ways to accelerate a country’s development by aligning all available foreign aid to address the identified challenges.
• New approaches and paradigms are utilized based on local context, from project cocreation to the agency’s new private sector engagement policy, to supercharge the effort.
• Finally, USAID repeatedly monitors the process to ensure that host countries maintain true ownership over their development and that the goals remain relevant in a constantly changing world.
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Without the guiding vision and approach of J2SR, I fear USAID and its resources will once again be battered by a dizzying array of special interest initiatives that are more about getting a headline than getting results. While the career staff supports J2SR, political pressures to focus on short-term, politically beneficial projects are a real threat in every administration.
It would also cause recipient countries to become more dependent on our assistance, waste taxpayer resources, and cede space to malign foreign actors actively competing against U.S. interests.
So, what does J2SR look like in action? Right now, it’s restarting education programs in Madagascar to tackle one of that nation’s most significant barriers to growth. It’s realigning resources in North Macedonia to end unnecessary legacy programs. Throughout the world, it’s empowering societies and governments to provide for the needs of their people.
That’s what genuine compassion and freedom look like, and it’s how we should invest our foreign aid to achieve real results. We cannot allow this progress to be ad hoc or personality-dependent. A clear and accountable system, such as J2SR, ensures strategy, resources, and programs are continually refined to achieve results.
Before the Biden administration took over, USAID had put together the necessary country-level strategies and began realigning resources to match each strategy. Now, Congress needs to align the resources to the strategies, and the administration needs to produce updated country road maps this fall.
I hope USAID continues to focus on the fundamentals of good international development and doubles down on sustainable development outcomes — which means following the J2SR.
About the author
Jim Richardson
Jim Richardson is a participant at the Consensus for Development Reform and has over 20 years of experience as an independent consultant. He is the former director of the Office of Foreign Assistance in the U.S. Department of State, where he coordinated $35 billion in foreign assistance across the State Department and the USAID, ensuring policy, performance, and budget alignment. Before that, he served as coordinator at USAID’s Transformation Task Team, where he led the Agency’s historic reorganization to reshape the agency around the principle of “Ending the Need for Foreign Assistance.”
