Professional Affiliation

Former Chief of Staff at USAID

Expert Bio

Dr. Bill Steiger most recently was Chief of Staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development.  Previously, he was Managing Director of Pink Ribbon Red Ribbon, a public-private consortium of companies, foundations, and non-governmental organizations dedicated to the fight against cervical and breast cancer in the developing world.  From 2001 to 2009, Dr. Steiger was Director of the Office of Global Health Affairs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Special Assistant for International Affairs to the Secretary of HHS.  During this time, he served as a member of the Executive Board of the World Health Organization; the Executive Committee of the Pan American Health Organization; and the Board of Directors of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria.  Earlier in his career, he was chief Education-Policy Advisor to the Governor of Wisconsin.  Dr. Steiger earned his Ph.D. in Latin American History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and graduated summa cum laude from Yale University with a Bachelor's degree in History.

Wilson Center Project

The Past and Future of the Journey to Self-Reliance in U.S. Development Assistance

Project Summary

On his first day in office, Ambassador Mark Green, confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) only a few days before, called for a complete reorientation of American foreign assistance.  In three short sentences, Green established the core principles of what he came to call “the Journey to Self-Reliance,” the clearest and most data-driven philosophy to guide USAID in decades.  Under this rubric, the United States has declared that, rather than being an end in itself, foreign aid should have the explicit, measurable goal of building self-sufficiency in partner nations as soon as possible to allow them to forgo outside help. 

Some critics in the traditional development community heard in Green’s speech something he did not say:  that the United States should end all foreign assistance now.   Yet as Green laid out the values at heart of the new approach — individual human dignity, a hand up over handouts, emphasizing outcomes instead of outputs, and the natural desire for national and local leaders to avoid dependency on other countries— observers found it hard to argue with the Journey to Self-Reliance.  He and his team then turned to development experts and USAID’s staff to turn these values into a framework.  

USAID’s Policy Framework is the document that articulates Green’s vision in a formal way.  It describes the Agency’s role in promoting the Journey to Self-Reliance as “building a country’s capacity to plan, finance, and implement solutions to local development challenges, and ensuring that there is a commitment to see these solutions through effectively, inclusively, and with accountability.”  The Policy Framework makes a purposeful distinction between “country” and “government” and emphasizes that civil society, the private sector, communities, and citizens themselves must be equal partners in USAID’s programs. 

Unlike the wave of closures of USAID Missions in Eastern Europe and Central Asia when the  United States hastily “graduated”countries in search of a ‘Peace Dividend” in the late 1990s, the approach of the Journey to Self-Reliance uses objective data to estimate the readiness of the government, civil society, and private sector in lower- and lower-middle-income countries to design, manage, and pay for their own development.  In some nations, these data show that the day foreign assistance will no longer be necessary is close at hand; in others, external development aid will be required for many decades to come.  At the end of the Journey, when countries achieve advanced levels of self-reliance, Green envisioned not an abrupt cessation of U.S. foreign aid, but a “Strategic Transition” to a new model of peer-to-peer partnership.  But in all cases, the Journey to Self-Reliance offers, for the first time, a clear, non-partisan methodology for assessing progress to enable USAID to calibrate its programs and investments.  

At the heart of this system is the Self-Reliance Country Roadmaps, the visual representation of  

17 independent, third-party metrics that measure national capacity and commitment.  Along with a larger compendium of secondary metrics, the Roadmaps aggregate best-in-class assessments of economic freedom, democracy and citizen-responsive governance, environmental and social conditions (including indicators in health and education), human rights, equality, and other factors that reflect progress against the two dimensions of the approach.  Every USAID Mission has now incorporated analysis of these metrics into its Country or Regional Development Cooperation Strategy that will guide its programmatic decisions for the next five years. 

In addition, the Journey to Self-Reliance relies upon five complementary lines of effort to accelerate capacity and commitment at the country level: 

1.     Through “Financing Self-Reliance,” USAID works with governments to develop “effective, transparent, and accountable systems to better-mobilize domestic resources” on a sustainable basis; 

2.     “Private-Sector Engagement” involves improving and broadening USAID’s partnerships with commercial firms and investors, including “innovative financing approaches”; 

3.     “Redefining the Relationship with Partner Governments” means USAID realigns the incentives that define the Agency’s country-level relationships to ensure they advance self-reliance; 

4.     “Rethinking How We Partner” encompasses internal reforms of policies and procedures at USAID to focus on new, underutilized, and local partners through Effective Partnerships and Procurement Reform, the Agency’s first Acquisition and Assistance Strategy, and the New Partnerships Initiative; and

5.     "Countering Malign Influence" helps countries avoid dependency and protect their sovereignty and journey towards self-reliance. 

Each of these approaches requires cross-cutting coordination and change that go well beyond just the Regional Bureaus that supervise USAID’s field Missions, which makes the Journey to Self-Reliance a whole-of-Agency Transformation. 

Since USAID Administrator-Designate Ambassador Samantha Power embraced the rhetoric of self-reliance in her recent confirmation hearing before the Committee on Foreign Relations of the U.S. Senate, many observers believe the Biden Administration will keep much of the vision and framework that Mark Green brought to the Agency.  This project therefore will memorialize the story of how the Journey to Self-Reliance came to be and provide recommendations for dealing with several trends that challenge the approach.  These key questions include the following: 

• How should the Journey to Self-Reliance account for the continued, aggressive promotion by the Chinese Communist Party of debt diplomacy and authoritarian models (including an all-seeing surveillance state)? 
• Can the Journey to Self-Reliance bring about coherence between USAID’s development aid programs and its humanitarian assistance, especially to prevent dependency and avoid the moral hazard of propping up brutal regimes that are perpetuating complex crises? 
• Can the vision of the Journey to Self-Reliance overcome bureaucratic inertia, the parochial agendas of Congressional Members and staff, the financial incentives of the recipients of USAID’s funds, and the resistance of the U.S. Department of State to make Strategic Transitions actually happen?