Joining Forces to Catalyze Investment in the Developing World

MCC
U.S.-Africa Business Forum 2016
3 min readSep 20, 2016

By Sarah Crawford, MCC Director of Strategic Partnerships

This week, alongside the 71st Session of the UN General Assembly, business and government leaders from the United States and Africa have come together to pursue trade and investment opportunities at the U.S.-Africa Business Forum. As the director of a new office focused on strategic partnerships at the U.S. Government’s Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), I’m excited to announce a new collaboration designed to further these efforts.

MCC and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) are joining forces to deepen the impact of our analytic tools to inform investment decisions that can not only unlock economic growth but also enhance well-being. Together, working hand-in-hand with our partner countries, we will convene the international development community, the private sector, and non-governmental investors to share our economic analyses and identify potential partnership and investment opportunities.

MCC knows that the investment needs of our partner countries far exceed the funding available through our compact and threshold programs. And our limited grant funds are directly tied to key obstacles to economic growth and poverty reduction that we determine and validate through a rigorous analytical process.

Over the past year, MCC, OECD and the Government of Cote d’Ivoire have worked together to produce robust, world-class analysis that the Government of Cote d’Ivoire has now translated into an ambitious investment plan — including the MCC compact currently in development and the action plan resulting from Cote d’Ivoire’s work with OECD on a Multidimensional Country Review. Through this new collaboration, we’ll share these findings more broadly in an effort to catalyze additional investment in and around MCC investments.

Our first investor convening will be held this fall and focus on investment opportunities in Cote d’Ivoire. And we hope to continue this level of coordination with other countries in Africa and globally, with Senegal as our next focus country.

Collaboration like this reinforces the 2005 Paris Declaration, the 2008 Accra Agenda for Action, and the Busan commitment to partnerships for effective development cooperation, and demonstrates the type of strategic partnerships MCC seeks. All development partners, including both donors and host countries, are interested in the greatest impact for their development dollars. We believe MCC investments are most effective and sustainable when they help to catalyze further government, private sector, and community investment.

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MCC
U.S.-Africa Business Forum 2016

MCC — the Millennium Challenge Corporation — is an innovative & independent U.S. Government agency reducing global poverty through economic growth.