This paper describes the development and validation of the Self-Reliance Index (SRI), a standardized measurement tool designed to assess the multi-dimensional self-reliance of refugee and internally displaced person (IDP) households in humanitarian settings. The tool was developed between March 2017 and March 2020 through a community of practice led by RefugePoint and the Women’s Refugee Commission, drawing on a literature review, expert consultation, and input from displaced persons themselves.
The SRI was designed to be administered through a semi-structured conversation rather than a questionnaire. It covers 12 domains of self-reliance: housing adequacy and rent, food security, education, healthcare access, health status, safety, employment, financial resources, assistance reliance, debt, savings, and social capital. Each domain is scored on a scale of 1 to 5, and a composite SRI score is calculated as an average across domains. Three domains—food security, health status, and assistance reliance—were designated as “bare minimum” conditions and incorporated into an adjusted scoring formula to prevent households that are food insecure or fully aid-dependent from receiving artificially high composite scores.
The SRI was piloted with refugee households in Nairobi, Kenya (with data collected by RefugePoint) and Palenque, Mexico (with data collected by Asylum Access). Baseline interviews were conducted with 57 households in Kenya and 59 in Mexico (116 total); follow-up interviews were conducted approximately three months later with 34 households in Kenya and 33 in Mexico (67 total).
Main findings:
- Initial SRI scores exhibited an upward skew that was inconsistent with practitioner knowledge of household vulnerability. In Kenya, the baseline median score was 3.92 and in Mexico it was 3.40, on a scale of 1 to 5. Staff at both implementing organizations assessed that these scores were higher than expected given what was known about the households, indicating that the initial scoring rubric required refinement.
- The SRI demonstrated acceptable internal consistency at both pilot sites, meeting the pre-specified reliability threshold. This suggests that each of the 12 domains seems to capture some dimension of self-reliance across sites. In addition, the extent to which each domain was correlated with the pre-adjusted SRI score was analyzed. Health status was the only domain not initially correlated with the overall SRI score, necessitating a recoding of its response options and scoring protocol.
- Testing of logical statements revealed that the initial scoring rubric failed to adequately capture households at the lowest levels of self-reliance. Four logical statements were tested in the data to assess the extent to which the basic scoring rubric provided a valid representation of a household’s overall self-reliance. Two were not met under the basic rubric: in Kenya none of the 17 households that had not eaten a full meal in the prior day scored at or below 2.5, while only two of 12 households in Mexico met this same condition; and in Kenya none of the 15 households fully reliant on assistance for food, housing, or healthcare scored at or below 2.5, while only two of 16 households in Mexico met this same condition. This indicated that the composite score was insufficiently sensitive to critical deprivations in core domains.
- An adjusted scoring rubric, with three “bare minimum” domains, improved the validity of SRI scores. Following the logical statement analysis, food security (Domain 2), health status (Domain 5), and assistance reliance (Domain 9) were identified as threshold conditions. The revised formula calculates a score based on the average of the remaining nine domains, from which deductions are applied based on performance in the three bare minimum domains. Under the revised rubric, all four logical conditions were met at both sites.
- Sensitivity analyses using data from Syria and Lebanon confirmed the reliability and applicability of the revised rubric across diverse contexts. The SRI demonstrated acceptable internal consistency in both Lebanon and Syria, all four logical conditions were met in Lebanon and three of four were met in Syria. These results supported the cross-contextual applicability of the SRI, while reinforcing the need for localized contextualization.
- Households in Kenya scored higher on self-reliance than those in Mexico, a pattern consistent with the known characteristics of the two samples. Kenyan respondents had resided in the country longer and had more established social networks, whereas Mexican respondents were more recent arrivals with fewer community ties.
The authors conclude that the SRI is a feasible, reliable, and valid tool for measuring household self-reliance in humanitarian settings. They highlight the tool’s value providing NGO staff with a more holistic picture of the household’s situation than was normally gleaned from day-to-day encounters with clients. They note that the SRI can serve multiple programmatic functions simultaneously: screening and targeting clients for assistance, informing referral protocols, guiding decisions about when to responsibly graduate households from aid, and supporting trend analysis over time. They emphasize that while the SRI is designed as a universal tool, effective deployment requires contextualization—including adapting definitions of adequate housing and school-age thresholds to local conditions—and that failure to contextualize risks undermining the validity of scores. Third, the authors highlight the integration of the SRI and its scoring rubric into widely used humanitarian data platforms (Kobo and CommCare) as a means of facilitating adoption within existing organizational monitoring systems.