Since its creation in 2004, MCC has reserved a seat at the table for members of civil society during compact development and implementation. Now, we are formalizing this process and actively
Jake Lyell for MCC
Three boys stand before an MCC-funded bridge in northern Senegal. MCC is formalizing its NGO consultation process to bring members of civil society into our compact development and implementation process sooner.
seeking opportunities for our NGO partners to tell us what we need to know before we let the ink dry in the development of new projects.
Your contributions give our perspective depth, and help us more effectively tackle some of the most pressing challenges that individuals in developing countries face. Together, we can leverage MCC’s investments to complement yours. We can deliver the electricity that allows a hospital you’ve built to stay open, or a child to study at night. We can help provide the infrastructure for access to clean drinking water so the women you work with can avoid walking vast distances, sometimes at great personal danger, to bring clean water to their families. And MCC can build roads and bridges so students and teachers can get to the schools you sponsor, and farmers can take their goods to larger markets.
You’ve worked in many of the places we do, and still other places we may work in one day. What can you share? What do we need to know? There are questions to ask and opportunities to explore, and we want to include expertise from your organizations. This includes community-based organizations, aid groups, faith-based organizations, members of academia and think tanks, and individuals whose expertise in a given sector can help spur more effective poverty reduction to the most deserving. Creating the right conditions to lift people out of poverty is hard work, and we couldn’t do it without the expertise and input of our civil society partners.
The consultations are designed to take place at key milestones within the compact development process:
- After we have selected eligible countries, to provide insight into the development environment on the ground;
- After releasing each county’s constraints analysis, to provide an update on the potential sectors MCC will engage in;
- After projects have been selected and are in the design phase, providing an opportunity to align funding and leverage public-private partnerships for those projects.
We recently completed our Niger Compact consultation, and there will be others throughout 2016 for developing compacts in Côte d’Ivoire, Nepal, the Philippines, and Mongolia. Threshold programs under development in Togo and Sri Lanka will also hold their own roundtables.
By listening to the voices and experience of stakeholders and experts in civil society, we can leverage our compacts, your projects, and our collective impact to strengthen our aid efforts and effectively reduce poverty through economic growth.
Love this initiative or have a question? @Lorelle_CA