Acting on the Call 2018: A Focus on the Journey to Self-Reliance for Preventing Child and Maternal Deaths

Acting on the Call Report 2018 [PDF, 22MB]

USAID’s work to eliminate health system bottlenecks can yield an average return on investment of 6 to 1, and will make available around $26.9 billion in public and private funds in the health sector.

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. 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.

The report looks at the health status of 25 priority countries as well as the current capacity of the health system to meet the needs of women and children. 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. As in past years, this analysis builds on previous efforts and continues to refine how USAID works with governments to meet their health goals. This report is also part of a larger USAID effort to make child health is one of the measures of capacity to measure progress in the overall journey to self-reliance.

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.

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