MCC has broadened and deepened its partnerships with partner country governments, public donors, the private sector, and other U.S. Government agencies to further its impact, scale, and innovation as well as the sustainability of its programs.
Partnership Annual Program Statement
MCC utilizes its Partnership Annual Program Statement (APS) to facilitate open, fair, and transparent competition of partnering opportunities and to foster proactive collaboration and partnership co-creation among MCC and potential partners. The APS enables MCC and prospective partners to co-create partnerships that make best use of each organization’s distinct knowledge, networks, innovations, investments, personnel, and resources. To date, MCC has awarded over 20 partnerships via the APS using cooperative agreements, each of which had a required cost-share component. These partnerships have strengthened MCC’s due diligence of compact and threshold programs. MCC has 15 APS partnerships currently in implementation. Significant activities related to APS partnerships in fiscal year 2020 include:
- The initiation of a partnership with the University of Massachusetts to enhance benefits of MCC’s programs by better incorporating deep uncertainties in economic analysis, particularly in the realms of environment and climate change. The partnership draws on the latest insights from academia and development practice to provide guidance on conducting cost-benefit analyses in the context of limited information and uncertain costs and benefits, while remaining mindful of MCC’s project timelines.
- The initiation of a partnership with Tulane University’s Commitment to Equity Institute to enable distributional analyses of the welfare impacts of proposed activities early in the MCC compact design and negotiation processes, to develop practical methods for quantifying the current impact on inequality and poverty of public investments in infrastructure, and to develop fiscal incidence analyses and toolkits for MCC and partner country governments to use.
- The initiation of a partnership with the United Nations Capital Development Fund to assess digital finance as a driver for improving last mile access to electricity and electrical equipment in the Senegal Compact. This partnership will inform and raise awareness of financial inclusion strategies that enable electricity use and financial products and services best suited to the needs of women and youth in rural Senegal.
- The completion of Phase 1 of a partnership with The Brookings Institution on urban economic analysis. The partnership produced a working paper that outlines a framework for analyzing constraints to growth at the city level by incorporating agglomeration economics with more established growth diagnostic techniques. Phase 2 of the partnership that will pilot the framework in MCC partner countries has now begun. Learning from the pilot will help both to refine the working paper as well as potentially inform MCC program designs.
- The completion of a partnership with The Brookings Institution in which Brookings provided recommendations to MCC on how gender inequalities can be integrated in the application of the HRV model during the constraints analysis process in Constraints That Bind (or Don’t): Integrating Gender into Economic Constraints Analysis, published April 2020. Brookings also conducted a meta-analysis of recent evaluations of programs that support women’s entrepreneurship. In September 2020, they released a report on “What Works for Women Micro-Entrepreneurs,” which concluded that training alone, without mentoring or other support, was not as effective.
- The completion of a partnership with Harvard University to expand Growth Diagnostics methods and techniques, which form the basis of MCC’s Constraints to Growth Analysis. The partnerships improved the theoretical foundations and practical guidance for conducting growth diagnostics in the areas of human capital, finance, and private sector market failures.
- The completion of a partnership with Bechtel in Côte d’Ivoire that focused on developing a national infrastructure master plan. This partnership enabled MCC to deepen its understanding of the relevance of infrastructure master planning approaches to MCC’s model, to assess how national infrastructure master planning could impact MCC’s ability to catalyze private sector engagement in its program, to understand the opportunities for leveraging master plans for blended finance, and to increase MCC staff understanding of infrastructure master planning methodologies.
Program Partnership Solicitation
MCC is developing new partnering mechanisms that will further increase opportunities for partnerships within compact and threshold programs. MCC piloted an inaugural mechanism, termed the Program Partnership Solicitation (PPS), in Morocco and Lesotho in fiscal year 2020.
- MCA-Morocco made the first partnership award via the PPS in 2020 as part of the Workforce Development Activity under the Morocco II Compact. MCA-Morocco partnered with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Jameel Poverty Action Lab and Harvard Kennedy School’s Evidence for Policy Design, along with a constellation of national collaborators, to advance the use of evidence in policy making for employment in Morocco. The partnership is expected to unlock insights to maximize the effectiveness of government policy to support the creation of jobs, including for youth, whose unemployment rate is double that of the general population.
- MCA-Morocco is also using the PPS in the Workforce Development Activity to form a partnership with a public or private university and a private sector actor experienced in Artificial Intelligence, big data, and statistical analysis to develop a digital platform for the labor market. This interactive platform is envisaged to improve job placement services by providing users with different types of information relating to the labor market (real-time data and information, trends, information on supply and demand, skills, training, etc.). MCA-Morocco expects to sign the partnership in March 2021.
- The Lesotho Millennium Development Agency (the MCA in Lesotho) and the Lesotho Pension Fund are using the PPS to catalyze a first-of-its-kind Lesotho Impact Investment Fund (LIIF) and associated Technical Assistance Facility (TAF). The MCA expects the LIIF and TAF to increase investment and loans for Lesotho’s key strategic sectors including agriculture and high-value horticulture, creative industries, tourism, and manufacturing, as well as MSMEs and women- owned or youth-owned businesses.
Partnership with USAID for Women’s Business Data Lab and e-Community in Côte d’Ivoire
The Women’s Global Development and Prosperity Fund, which USAID implements, selected MCC to receive an award of $4 million in FY20 resources to establish a Women’s Business Data Lab and e-Community in Côte d’Ivoire. The lab will offer female entrepreneurs and women-led businesses a center to build their digital and data skills, network, and collaborate with other female entrepreneurs and business leaders. To complement in-person training and convening available at the lab, MCC and private sector partners will also support a virtual network of digitally enabled female entrepreneurs within the country.
Partnership with Women in Science (WiSci)
MCC is helping to empower the next generation of female leaders by bringing the Women in Science (WiSci) program to MCC partner countries. WiSci is a public-private partnership designed to motivate young women to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) career fields. Through experiential learning, cross-cultural peer interaction, industry connections, and learning from accomplished scientists and technologists, WiSci seeks to empower young women with knowledge, leadership, and technical skills needed during times of rapid technological development. Through a partnership with the U.S. Department of State and close collaboration with the United Nations Foundation’s Girl Up program and other curriculum partners such as NASA, Caterpillar, AI4All, Astrobotic, Georgia Tech, and MIT, MCC and MCA-Morocco helped to bring virtual workshops and discussions to participants from Morocco, Côte d’Ivoire and the United States in summer 2020. The WiSci Morocco online programming demonstrated the impact of the WiSci partnership and program model to MCC compacts and threshold programs, and MCC is working with WiSci partners to launch additional WiSci camps in other MCC partner countries.
Power Africa
To fulfill the agency’s goal of removing constraints to economic growth, MCC is undertaking major power programs in sub-Saharan Africa in collaboration with Power Africa, a U.S. Government interagency initiative, to bring affordable electricity to the people of sub-Saharan Africa. To date, MCC has completed approximately $350 million worth of power projects in Malawi and, together with other partner countries, is continuing to implement an additional $2 billion worth of power projects that will improve the quality and reliability of electricity in Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Liberia, Senegal, and Sierra Leone. These projects focus not only on building physical infrastructure but also on improving the enabling environment to attract private sector investment. Examples include financing a photovoltaic solar power project in Benin with independent power producers and project finance lenders and improving the financial position and operations of the utility in Burkina Faso.
Data for Development Capacity Building
The Data Collaboratives for Local Impact (DCLI) program, under a $21.8 million interagency agreement funded by the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and implemented by MCC, empowers individuals and communities to use data to improve lives through better decisions, investments, resource allocation, and transparency. DCLI engages locally and inclusively to promote policies and practices that balance data availability and privacy; establishes centers to build data skills, civic technology, and collaboration; and leverages resources, innovation, and partnerships to develop more substantial outcomes for partner countries. The program works across sectors to improve health, control the HIV epidemic, empower women and youth, and contribute to economic growth.
DCLI’s first investment established the Tanzania Data Lab (dLab), which focuses on the proliferation of data use by building the data skills of individuals and communities. To date, the dLab has increased Tanzania’s local supply of data expertise by training over 2,000 individuals and nearly 3,000 organizations. In 2018, the dLab and the University of Dar es Salaam launched a Master’s in Data Science program, the first of its kind in East Africa. It has produced 30 local data scientists including nine DCLI-funded PEPFAR Scholars, of whom four are women. Graduates have been employed by private sector organizations like Vodacom Tanzania and implementation partners like Management and Development for Health (MDH) and the Benjamin Mkapa Foundation. The dLab’s efforts at the subnational level in the Kyela district led the Tanzanian Bureau of Statistics to approve citizen-generated data as a valid source of statistical information, despite previous restrictive data policies. Since its founding, the dLab has built a reputation as a center of excellence in promoting innovation and data literacy.
In mid-2018, DCLI expanded to Côte d’Ivoire to grow the availability of data skills and to build capacity in the data ecosystem. In collaboration with the Ministry of Development and Planning, DCLI launched an open data readiness assessment and action plan to coordinate activities in data policies, openness, and capacity building. One hundred thirty-five young Ivorian fellows completed data science training, and the Ivorian government placed them within national and regional ministries and organizations to augment their use of data. DCLI partnered with Des Chiffres et des Jeunes to develop a scalable data inventory platform that includes 545 registered data sets from nearly 300 organizations that were trained on the value of data and data protection, re-use of existing data sets and to avoid collecting already-available data. Through 2020, DCLI worked to improve data use at 23 PEPFAR-priority health facilities, embedding data fellows and developing technical solutions that the Ivorian Ministry of Health can scale to other locations.
The DCLI program has highlighted the opportunity to empower women economically by providing them the data skills to participate in the growing global digital economy and changing global workforce. The program has managed to exceed gender parity in program participation (59 percent in Tanzania and 45 percent in Côte d’Ivoire). DCLI’s collaboration with the Stanford Women in Data Science is being extended in Tanzania to adolescent girls and young women aspiring to become data scientists, pairing them virtually with high school counterparts in Silicon Valley.
Overall, an independent assessment concluded that the DCLI program increased the data skills of individuals and organizations, improved data use for service delivery and resource allocation at subnational levels, and fostered improved data use among nongovernmental organizations, local governments, and entrepreneurs.