The last board meeting of the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) under the Obama administration will take place on December 13, 2016. On the docket? Selecting which countries will be eligible for MCC assistance for fiscal year (FY) 2017. For the fourteenth year running, CGD’s Rethinking US...

The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), an independent US foreign assistance agency, was established with broad bipartisan support in January 2004. MCC has a single objective—reducing poverty through economic growth—which allows it to pursue development objectives in a targeted way. T...

This brief reviews the MCC’s focus on policy performance. A longer discussion can be found in the full paper, “Focus on Results: MCC’s Model in Practice.”

This brief reviews the MCC’s focus on policy performance. A longer discussion can be found in the full paper, “Focus on Policy Performance: MCC’s Model in Practice.”

One of the key pillars of MCC’s model is that country ownership matters for results. In broad terms, the idea of country ownership is that donors’ engagement with developing countries should reflect the understanding that partner country governments, in consultation with key stakeholders...

When MCC was founded, there was widespread skepticism about the effectiveness of foreign assistance. Many observers, both external and internal to development institutions, agreed that too much aid was being spent on poor projects in service of poorly defined objectives with correspondingly little u...