WASHINGTON – The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) announced today the winners of three awards: Visa Inc. has won the MCC Corporate Award; Millennium Challenge Account-Mongolia has won the MCC Country Commitment Award, and Jonny Dorsey has won MCC’s Next Generation Award. The winners will be honored at MCC’s inaugural Forum on Global Development on April 25.
MCC’s Forum on Global Development offers a unique occasion for visionaries and practitioners in international development to meet, exchange ideas and honor three innovators for their demonstrated commitment to creative approaches to helping the world’s poor.
“MCC was created to deliver smart, effective assistance by pushing the envelope on best practices in country-led, results-focused, reform-driven development,” said MCC CEO Daniel W. Yohannes. “As leaders in investment, innovation and gender integration, this year’s honored recipients are role models for effective development in action and share our commitment to prosperity as they work to help people lift themselves out of poverty.”
MCC’s Corporate Award has been established to recognize an American company for demonstrating exemplary commitment to trade or investment in one or more MCC partner countries. This year’s winner, Visa Inc., is headquartered in San Francisco, California. Visa is a global payments technology company that connects consumers, businesses, financial institutions, and governments in more than 200 countries and territories to fast, secure and reliable digital currency. Visa is committed to using its core business, strategic philanthropic investments and financial literacy programs to help the financially-underserved around the world access formal financial services—including ways to pay and be paid for everyone, everywhere.
Visa provides free financial literacy programs to millions around the world with a goal to reach 20 million people worldwide by May 2013—a commitment it announced at the Clinton Global Initiative conference in 2009. In 2011, Visa and the Government of Rwanda announced a Charter of Collaboration to develop localized solutions to extend access to financial services to citizens throughout the country. Visa also supports some of the world’s leading nongovernmental organizations, such as joining with the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Australian Agency for International Development to support the GSMA mWomen Program and its goal to reduce the mobile phone gender gap and improve women’s access to life-enhancing financial services.
MCC’s Country Commitment Award recognizes a Millennium Challenge Account that has demonstrated exemplary commitment to one of MCC’s core principles. This year’s award focuses on leadership in advancing MCC’s corporate goal of gender integration.
This year’s winner, MCA-Mongolia, implements MCC's five-year, $285 million compact with the Government of Mongolia. The compact makes strategic investments to increase economic activity through secure and registered land titles in urban areas, sustainable utilization and management of rangelands near cities and improved vocational and technical training. Additional investments help ensure Mongolians become healthier and more productive, improve urban air quality by increasing the adoption of energy-efficient products and homes in the ger districts (traditional dwellings) of Ulaanbaatar, support the development of renewable energy, and improve the road in the north-south economic corridor.
MCA-Mongolia has demonstrated a commitment to gender integration across a wide range of operational areas, including program implementation, communications and monitoring and evaluation. It conducted gender trainings with its program implementation units and contractors and established points of contact on gender issues in each such unit. Through quarterly meetings, MCA-Mongolia tracks progress on gender integration, and programmatic interventions have been designed more effectively as a result.
MCC’s Next Generation Award recognizes a student leader in the United States who is making a difference in the fight to reduce poverty in one or more MCC partner countries through advocacy, research or resource mobilization.
This year’s winner, Jonny Dorsey, is a northern California native who has co-founded two international NGOs: FACE AIDS and the Global Health Corps. FACE AIDS, a student campaign to fight HIV/AIDS, was founded in 2005 when, as a Stanford University undergraduate, Dorsey traveled to Zambia to volunteer in a refugee camp. The experience of watching a friend suffer from AIDS with no access to care prompted him and his classmates to create the organization. As the organization's executive director, Dorsey worked to define FACE AIDS' vision, expand the organization to a network of university and high school campuses across the country and mobilize college students to raise more than $2 million for Partners in Health's HIV/AIDS program in Rwanda.
During his work with FACE AIDS, Dorsey met talented young people struggling to launch careers in public service. This prompted him to co-found Global Health Corps, a fellowship program that places emerging leaders from around the world with high-impact organizations building health systems. This year, Global Health Corps will arrange 90 placements for fellows to work with nonprofits and governments across the world. The fellows will perform a wide range of activities, from conducting analyses of supply chains to training community health workers. Dorsey is currently a graduate student, concurrently studying for a Master of Public Administration at Harvard University and a Master of Business Administration at Stanford University.
Gayle Smith, Special Assistant to President Barack Obama and Senior Director at the National Security Council, and Michael Gerson, columnist for the Washington Post and senior advisor to the ONE Campaign, will join the award recipients in a panel discussion at the Forum about the importance of foreign aid. The panel will also include Sheila Herrling, MCC’s Vice President for Policy and Evaluation. As a learning institution, MCC aims to foster dialogue across a wide spectrum of people and organizations with the ultimate goal of providing the best results and sustainable impact for those in need around the world.
For more information about MCC and its programs around the world please go to http://www.mcc.gov
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The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) is an innovative and independent U.S. Government foreign aid agency that is helping lead the fight against global poverty through the promotion of sustainable economic growth. MCC is based on the principle that aid is most effective when it reinforces good governance, economic freedom and investments in people. To learn more about MCC please visit www.mcc.gov