Foreign assistance data people, unite!

Posted on June 18, 2012 by Alicia Phillips Mandaville, Director, Development Policy

One of the positive (if unanticipated) side effects of making changes to the MCC scorecard last year was the volume of interaction our team had with colleagues in other parts of the U.S. Government who are also interested in using indicator data for decision making. While it’s the large raw data producers posting to data.gov that come to mind when people think about data and the government, there are small offices all over the foreign affairs community using—or investigating how to use—global indicator data for internal decision making. After several months of one-on-one conversations with folks at the State Department, Peace Corps and USAID about these different efforts, we thought it made sense to actually gather everyone together.

So we did. A couple of weeks ago, some 20-30 U.S. Government colleagues hunkered down for a few hours at MCC and spent the morning introducing our own data practices to each other. While we (of course) spent some time noting the finer points of being “the data people” inside agencies that may not always love what the data says, it was a really productive morning.

Each of our offices has hit some similar challenges: What do you do when you can’t find globally comparable data? How does data interact with the judgment of human beings? What happens when the data shows decline that no one expected? How do I make findings come to life for decision makers? Why is it so hard to convince people that statistical noise is manageable but not eradicable? And we’ve gone about addressing them in some very different ways. Even hearing how different offices have had to explain the rationale behind data-driven decision making to their colleagues was illuminating.

This was an initial meeting, meant to get to know each other and identify common challenges and interests. Judging from the questions and calls for follow-up conversations, I feel confident that at least some of us will gather again soon. And that’s good news for collective U.S. Government learning on the ins and outs of evidence-based decision making about foreign assistance.

Score: plus one for the data people.

MCC Marks International Women’s Day

Posted on March 8, 2011 by Cassandra Butts, Senior Advisor

Today we celebrate the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day. Here at MCC, we’re using the occasion to continue to put a spotlight on the need for a focus on gender equality in global development efforts.

We are proud of the positive feedback we have received on MCC’s gender policy work, and today we release a paper in which Virginia Seitz, our lead expert on gender and social assessment, outlines some of operational lessons we’ve learned integrating gender into our programs. It’s recommended reading for anyone interested in making sure women and men have equal access to the tools of economic growth. You can read it here.

This is also a big week for two young girls from rural Burkina Faso. MCC is hosting Aissatou Hamidou Diallo and Fatimata Yanta, students who participate in the MCC-funded BRIGHT school program in Burkina. The BRIGHT program has given these girls an opportunity for an education, and they’re making the most of it; they are both at the top of their class. Aissatou and Fatimata were invited to be honored guests at a White House reception hosted by First Lady Michelle Obama celebrating the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month. It is our hope that this experience allows them to build lasting understandings of the essential role of girls’ education in fighting poverty and contributing to economic growth and inspires them to keep up their good work in the classroom.

This Thursday, Aissatou and Fatimata along with Madame Madeline Sorgo – a Burkina educator and board member of the Burkina Millennium Challenge Account –  will also join our CEO, Daniel Yohannes, U.S. Senator Ben Cardin and U.S. Representative Nita Lowey at an event on Capitol Hill. It will feature remarks from Mr. Yohannes, Senator Cardin and Rep. Lowey and a panel discussion on the importance of gender equality to our development efforts. If you are in the Washington area, please feel free to attend. The event is at 12 p.m. this Thursday, March 10, in Room 325 of the Russell Senate Office Building. Follow this link to RSVP.

Check back on this blog and on MCC’s Facebook page for photos from this week’s events.

Focusing on Gender Integration

Posted on September 23, 2010 by Cassandra Butts, Senior Advisor

On Tuesday, September 21, MCC and the White House Council on Women and Girls co-hosted a high-level roundtable discussion on “Gender Integration in Practice” as a side event in New York on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly meetings on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The Obama Administration is deeply committed to MDG 3—promote gender equality and empower women—as evidenced in the remarks from Tina Tchen, Executive Director of the White House Council on Women and Girls, and Ambassador Melanne Verveer, Ambassador-At-Large for Global Women’s issues.  Both noted that the empowerment of women and girls is very much a part of the U.S. Government’s national security strategy and foreign policy objectives.

Other participants included the First Ladies of Lesotho and Malawi, Congressman Russ Carnahan, and prominent representatives from the private sector, NGO, and donor communities.

The roundtable discussion centered on “gender integration in practice”: How do we move beyond describing how gender differences and inequalities shape development opportunities to ensuring that we actually are achieving gender equality outcomes?

Representatives from the private sector called on the “convening power of government” to foster cooperation in achieving gender equality goals through partnerships with civil society, private firms, and government entities.

Participants noted the challenges of changing institutional cultures and of “living up to our own rhetoric.”  Some noted that we must ensure that our attention to gender equality is not limited to “boutique projects” and, although there has been much progress in targeting issues that deeply affect women and girls, the challenge remains of mainstreaming gender analyses across development initiatives.

MCC’s corporate values of focusing on results and country ownership were acknowledged as core to achieving gender as well as other goals.  MCC noted our engagement in ensuring that leadership, mandate, capacity, resources, and accountability are incorporated in our operational attention to gender.

MCC CEO Daniel Yohannes opened the roundtable discussion, which I had the pleasure of moderating subsequently.  MCC was also represented by our gender and social assessment practice lead Virginia Seitz.  This engagement further demonstrates MCC’s high-level commitment to well integrating our much-noted gender policy into MCC operations and working collaboratively across the U.S. Government to keep the empowerment of women and girls at the forefront of the international dialogue on development assistance.