Witnessing U.S. Government impact in Mongolia
Posted on June 18, 2013 by Morton H. Halperin, Member of MCC’s Board of Directors
As a new MCC Board member, I was excited at the possibility of visiting MCC projects in Mongolia. One of our fiduciary responsibilities as board members is to ensure that MCC’s investments are a wise use of U.S. tax dollars. What I saw in Mongolia is encouraging evidence that MCC’s investments are making an effective difference.
I saw progress in all of these areas. For example, I visited a family in Chingeltei in their traditional house, or ger. The family owns an energy efficient stove subsidized by the compact’s Energy and Environment Project, which is helping nearly 100,000 families in Ulaanbaatar. I also handed out land ownership certificates to beneficiaries from five different districts as part of the Property Rights Project. I heard from Ambassador Piper Campbell about the importance of the 176.4 kilometer Road Project that will give Mongolia its first fully paved road connecting the country’s north and south. And, I also learned about non-communicable diseases, an issue of increasing attention around the world, through a visit to a family clinic in Sukhbaatar. Thanks to MCC’s investment, Mongolians are changing their behaviors to prevent non-communicable diseases and injuries such as cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes. This is improving their productive years in the labor force.
When the $285 million compact partnership is completed this September, Mongolia will be in a better position to generate greater private sector activity, which is the engine of long-term growth, through improved infrastructure and a healthier, more productive workforce ready to meet the skills demanded by private industry.
Seeing these projects clarified and reinforced that our tax dollars are improving the lives of Mongolians. The results are real; I saw them with my own eyes. And Mongolians themselves are taking the necessary steps to maintain these efforts well beyond the life of MCC’s compact. This strong commitment to sustainability gives me even more reason to believe in a prosperous and healthy future for Mongolians.
My work, on behalf of the Open Society Foundations, has focused on improving human rights and strengthening democracy, and I am encouraged by MCC’s work in Mongolia. With a commitment to democratic governance, sustainability, gender equality, and improving access to economic opportunities and health care, the MCC compact is working to reduce poverty though economic growth, help move Mongolia down the path toward self-sufficiency and deepen its democracy.
Burkina Faso partnership highlights importance of land governance
Posted on June 17, 2013 by Rick Gaynor, Lead of MCC’s Property Rights and Land Policy Practice Group
As part of the G-8’s session on trade, tax and transparency, the United States announced a partnership with the Government of Burkina Faso to strengthen land governance and increase transparency of land transactions—and MCC played a major role in making this partnership a reality.
The U.S.-Burkina Faso land partnership builds upon MCC’s $59 million Rural Land Governance Project in Burkina Faso, our largest and perhaps most ambitious land and property rights project to date. The Government of Burkina Faso, like a growing number of countries, recognized the central role that land and property rights play in economic growth and sought MCC’s support to implement its new land policy framework as part of its $481 million compact.
Good land governance and transparency in land transactions are priorities for the G-8 this year, and the U.S. partnership with Burkina Faso is one of several in which G-8 members are pairing with developing countries to promote secure tenure rights and equitable access to land.
The partnership builds on momentum created by the United Nations Committee on World Food Security’s adoption of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests, the ongoing negotiations on the Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment and the session on land governance at the Grow Africa investment summit in May. The G-8’s efforts signify a growing recognition by governments, the private sector, donor agencies, and civil society of the critical importance of land rights and the need to improve land and resource governance to promote economic growth and food security.
MCC is supporting land and property rights programs in 15 of our partner countries to help reduce poverty through economic growth. These programs are serving as models for others and catalyzing support from other donor organizations. The land team at MCC is committed to sharing the results, tools developed and lessons from our programs to encourage improved performance and sustainability in our future work and the work of others.
We thank our colleagues in Burkina Faso for the great progress they have made during the first four years of the compact, and we look forward to working with them as part of this new partnership.
Creating a competitive future for Morocco’s fishers
Posted on June 14, 2013 by Scott Fontaine, corporate copywriter-editor
The life of a Moroccan fisherman can be tough.
A boat packed with three or four men will launch well before sunrise. The fishermen occasionally need to stay on the ocean for two or three days until they fill their stores. Bad weather can shorten or cancel trips. When they return, they can face difficulty selling the catch at the peak of freshness or at the right price. Predatory middlemen often collude to keep prices low.
The lifestyle provides erratic income. Fishermen tend to be among the poorest Moroccans yet live on the coasts, where the cost of living is high without much of a safety net. But across the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts, improved landing sites stand as a symbol of hope for many of the country’s small-scale fishers.
Eleven improved landing sites are being built or operating as part of MCC’s $120 million Small-Scale Fisheries Project. The sites are gleaming white complexes built on the beach; a typical site contains an auction hall where fishermen can sell directly to distributors, storage units for equipment, a watch tower in case of a waterborne accident, a cafeteria to help fund the newly formed fishing cooperatives, and cold storage units to ensure the catch doesn’t spoil before reaching the marketplace.
About 78,000 people are expected to benefit from the landing sites. Along the Atlantic coast, fishermen in three towns where the sites have not yet opened are optimistic about the future.
In Salé, Samir Wakrim is most hopeful about the fishermen’s association being formed through the project and the medical insurance it will provide. The 33-year old has been fishing for more than two decades but can’t afford to miss work because of illness or injury.
A few years ago, he slid down some concrete steps and hurt his leg. Every day he spent recovering at home meant less and less income.
“For many of us, that’s a very big concern,” he said. “It’s a general problem for fishermen across Morocco.”
In Bhibeh, a fishermen’s cooperative has already formed and includes more than 115 members. For Khalid Lamziouk, days of hard work at sea can lead to despair when buyers aren’t available to purchase the catch.
The fishermen face a difficult choice: Wait for buyers to show up and risk spoilage, or pay for ice and transportation to sell the catch at a nearby town.
With the auction hall and cold storage, Lamziouk believes he can sell more of his fish and save the money he would have spent on ice and transportation costs.
“This is the right equipment at the right time,” he said.
In Tafedna, the prospect of an auction hall where fishermen can sell directly to distributors holds the greatest promise. Currently, middlemen will often advance money for gas and nets to crews of fishermen who agree to sell their catch exclusively to the middlemen at a fixed price.
“It creates a dependency this way,” cooperative president Mohamed Dibe said.
The fishermen in Tafedna have other problems, he said. Because of the town’s remote location, the few buyers collude to keep prices low, Dibe said. Some fishermen have chosen to leave Tafedna to work out of a neighboring, larger market, where there are more buyers and prices can be 50 percent higher.
Dibe is optimistic the auction hall will help fix that.
“The whole village suffered,” he said. “But now, all will benefit: the fishermen, their families, the whole community.”
Open data in action: Millennium Challenge Corporation’s data catalog
Posted on June 12, 2013 by Lauren Pfeifer, Policy Associate, One Campaign
MCC recognizes that transparency, aid effectiveness and accountability are all linked, which is why it has made a commitment to open data.
This blog was originally written and published by the One Campaign and is being cross-posted to our site. To view the original article, please visit their website here.
We’ve been talking about open data a lot lately. In my interview with Oluseun Onigbinde, he told you why open budget data is important for Nigerians, and before that, I explained why the new Executive Order expanding the US government’s open data policy is so important. And open data is a key ONE Campaign ask at the upcoming G8 Summit.
Now, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) has announced that its open data catalog (http://data.mcc.gov/) will contain metadata and microdata from its program evaluations in partner countries. The MCC is already one of the more transparent US programs, ranking first among the US programs assessed in Publish What You Fund’s 2012 Aid Transparency Index, and ninth globally.
Transparency in development programs helps to make sure that resources are being used effectively, that they’re achieving the desired results, and provides information to partner governments critical for planning their own development.
Expanding the Open Data catalog is part of the MCC’s Open Government Plan, which is founded on the principles of transparency and results. So far, metadata is available from agriculture programs in Armenia, Ghana, El Salvador and the Philippines. By allowing the public to download data in an open format, MCC is giving citizens, companies, and governments a valuable tool.
MCC hopes that this data will not only provide more and better ways to stay accountable for their development programs, but will also “inspire entrepreneurship, innovation and scientific discovery in the field of development and beyond.” MCC has said that the catalog is only the beginning – that we can look forward to more data releases.
Opening data is not always easy to do. The government-wide implementation of the open data policy will take some time. Making public new data sets takes a trifecta of political will, time and resources.
Often, agencies wait until these changes are forced upon them. It is refreshing to see the MCC out ahead of the open data curve, and we hope other agencies will follow their example as they face the challenge of making their databases “open” to the world.
This article was written by Lauren Pfeifer, who works on the Global Policy Team for the One Campaign. To view the original article on their website, please click here.
Home on the road
Posted on June 3, 2013 by Scott Fontaine, corporate copywriter-editor
On a dirt lot just off the Namialo-Rio Lurio section of the N1 highway in northern Mozambique lies the future home of the technicians maintaining the country’s highways.
The prefabricated homes sit in neat rows on a compound about 18 kilometers from the nearest town. Each offers three bedrooms, a kitchen and a living room. Small office buildings, a cafeteria and a bar are nearby.
Expatriate contractors working on the road rehabilitation—part of the Mozambique Compact’s $176 million Rehabilitation and Construction of Roads Project—live in the compound and will do so until the end of the project, as well as for a yearlong maintenance period following it. After that, MCA-Mozambique will assume ownership of the site and plans to turn it over to the Mozambican government’s National Road Administration.
The National Road Administration will need qualified engineers and other professionals to maintain the roads, but housing near many of the projects is often in short supply and expensive. The solution: the contractor camps.
The government plans to entice young, college-educated professionals to work in the public sector by offering housing on the compounds. It’s also a way to lure young professionals to work in the country’s poorer northern provinces, where jobs typically pay less than they do in the capital, Maputo.
MCA-Mozambique plans to hand over similar contractor residential compounds currently in use for each of the compact’s major infrastructure investments: roads in Nampula province, a dam outside Nacala, water supply stations in Nacala and Nampula, and drainage projects in Nampula and Quelimane.
It’s just one way MCC’s investments during implementation can promote sustainability for years to come.
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