Acting on the Call 2018: A Focus on the Journey to Self-Reliance
As a development agency, USAID aims to build capacity and reduce disease burden while strengthening health systems to enable countries to plan, fund, and manage their
own continued progress. The 2018 Acting on the Call report focuses on 25 countries’ journeys to self-reliance for preventing child and maternal deaths. Self-reliance is a country’s ability to finance and implement solutions to its own development challenges. In the report, we recount progress since the 2012 Call to Action as well as identify gaps in order to inform future programming and areas that need strengthening during the journey to self-reliance. For the first time ever, we’ve calculated the return on our investment to eliminate bottlenecks to improving health services.
Understanding where countries lie on this effort – known as the journey to self reliance – helps USAID to best partner with countries and support their efforts. By helping countries meet the needs of their women and children, USAID’s support is yielding immediate returns now – in the form of improved health services and health outcomes – and lasting returns in the future, when foreign assistance is no longer needed.
