On October 1, 2019, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) released the second iteration of the Journey to Self-Reliance Country Roadmaps on its public portal. The Country Roadmaps serve as USAID’s visualization tool for assessing self-reliance in a given country, based on 17 third-party, publicly available metrics that capture the concepts of Commitment and Capacity.

USAID produces Country Roadmaps annually for all low- and middle-income countries as classified by the World Bank. USAID updates the Country Roadmaps on an annual basis, and makes them publicly available at https://selfreliance.usaid.gov/. The tool allows USAID to assess at a high-level where a country sits on its Journey to Self-Reliance, and helps the Agency prioritize investments, craft strategies, and shape conversations with partners.

In this year’s Roadmaps for Fiscal Year (FY) 2020, USAID has modified four metrics from the inaugural Roadmaps released in FY 2019, based on extensive feedback from USAID’s Missions, host-country governments, and external stakeholders. The metric changes improve the Roadmaps’ overall robustness, and utility as a tool for strategic planning and bilateral dialogue. In some cases, these changes leverage newly available data, while in others the changes address methodological limitations, and expand country coverage. Translated versions of the FY 2020 Roadmap are now also available in Arabic, French, Portuguese, and Spanish.