Washington, D.C.—The Millennium Challenge Corporation released its annual scorecards for the 2015 fiscal year. These scorecards show how 83 of the poorest countries in the world score on 20 policy indicators measuring the extent to which those countries are ruled justly, have economic freedom and invest in their people. MCC’s Board of Directors use the scorecards in determining which countries should be eligible for MCC assistance.
The scorecards, available at www.mcc.gov/selection, use independent, third-party policy indicators. By using information collected from independent, third-party sources, MCC scorecards provide an objective comparison of all low income and lower middle income candidate countries.
The country selection process begins each year with MCC identifying countries that are candidates for MCC assistance in the Candidate Country Report and then publishing the Selection Criteria and Methodology Report to outline how countries will be considered for selection. Candidate country scorecards are then publicly issued, evaluating candidate countries’ performance on the MCC indicators. In addition to the scorecards, MCC’s Board of Directors will also consider MCC’s ability to impact growth and poverty reduction, as well as the availability of funding, when it makes eligibility decisions.
The publication of MCC’s scorecards underscores the agency’s commitment to transparency, which is integral to the MCC model and is a key component of enhancing aid effectiveness and ensuring accountability for taxpayer resources. In addition to the scorecards, MCC makes the underlying policy data and data on most of its country-specific activities available at the Open Data Catalog. Metadata (and eventually microdata) collected as part of MCC’s independent evaluations can be found at the Evaluation Catalog. MCC also publishes its programmatic data in machine-readable IATI format at the U.S. Government’s Foreign Assistance website. MCC views open data as a public good and strives to uphold high standards of transparency in the publication of its data.
MCC’s Board of Directors is expected to meet in December 10 to select countries as eligible for developing large-scale compacts and smaller threshold programs funded by MCC.