President Bush, appearing at the swearing in ceremony of MCC CEO John Danilovich last week, reiterated his support of the MCC as an innovative foreign aid agency and urged greater speed in completing country compacts:
The Financial Times recently reported on a rumored shake-up in the way US foreign aid is administered.
CEO Danilovich put some meat on the bones of his vision for the MCC (as well as rather strategically preempting many of the special interests and criticisms from the NGOs present) in a speech delivered to Interaction's annual CEO retreat last week. Danilovich sets forward 5 guiding principles:
Days before the MCC is supposed to sign its compact with Armenia, an article from Open Democracy, "Armenia's Emptying Democracy," flags major slippages in political rights, civil liberties and corruption -- all policy indicators measured by the MCC in determining country eligibility.
When the CFR released its new task force report "More than Humanitarianism: A Strategic Approach Toward Africa," it noted:
“We will know that the response to this opportunity has failed if, in another ten years, U.S. policymakers link hands once again with other world leaders around Africa’s problems and the world witnesses another global concert to end Africa’s poverty. The United States cannot afford to let another decade go by without effective solutions, and Africa deserves far better."
Dani Rodrik, Harvard professor and international economist, provides a compelling argument for why the growth vs. poverty reduction debate is a distraction from achieving greater global prosperity. Says Rodrik:
Today, the MCC announced its new management team and what it is calling a streamlined structure. Some changes make a lot of sense, like merging the threshhold program with the selection criteria and development policy folks under the same department.
Less publicized than the November MCC Board country selections is the important adoption of a policy on suspension and termination of MCC assistance and/or eligibility. The Board approved and then immediately applied its new policy to suspend Yemen from threshold program eligibility (received in 2004). Adoption and actual use of this policysends a strong signal that the MCC will not tolerate substantial policy and performance slippages.
The MCC Board’s selection last week of 23 counties eligible to apply for funding for FY 2006 held relatively few surprises, and was very close to what we had anticipated. Although it is unfortunate that the MCC decided to add the lower-middle income countries this year, the Board limited the number of selected countries to two – El Salvador and Namibia.
Ambassador Danilovich, the MCC's new CEO, has officially hit the DC ground running. Yesterday, he hosted his first public outreach meeting, where he publicly affirmed his commitment to selecting fewer countries and giving them much larger compacts in the hopes of fulfilling his corporation's 'transformational' goal in compact countries.