The 2018 Global Compact on Refugees includes “enhancing refugee self-reliance” as one of its
four main objectives. While the humanitarian community generally supports this aspiration, it is widely
recognized that there are few tools to measure progress toward this objective. In 2016, RefugePoint and
the Women’s Refugee Commission convened a Community of Practice (CoP), now known as the Refugee
Self-Reliance Initiative (RSRI), to address this gap, leading to the joint development of the Self-Reliance
Index (SRI). Over the course of two and half years, from March 2017 to August 2019, practitioners from
non-governmental organizations, government agencies, foundations, and research institutes worked
together to create a simple and universal tool to measure a refugee household’s progress toward selfreliance over time. The SRI Version 1.0 was made available for limited distribution from August 2019 –
February 2020 during a ‘soft launch’ phase.
This phase produced extensive learning that informed improvements in the SRI for Version 2.0.
Following assessments of interrater and intrahousehold reliability during the development stage, data
collected in the soft launch phase allowed for assessment of internal consistency. Analysis of the data
collected was also used to inform the final scoring system of the SRI. User experience and structured
feedback from the in-person training and remote support provided additional input for the refinement of
the tool, User Guide and training materials.
The iterative development of the SRI is a first global effort to create a universal tool to measure
refugee self-reliance, highlighting the importance of continuous learning to understand the SRI in new
settings and with new populations. As the SRI 2.0 is rolled out more widely with new partners and in new
contexts, there will be a continued effort to monitor the reliability and validity of the tool. In addition,
data from new contexts may inform decisions to further refine the tool’s scoring algorithm, although no
significant changes to the scoring system are anticipated. Objectives for the next phase will also be aimed
at integrating the SRI into a variety of partner systems and investigating the effectiveness of different
training mechanisms. The next phase also aims to explore how gender interacts with the use and results
of the SRI.