Section 3: Leveraging Partnerships
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, innovation and the sustainability of its programs.
Partnership Annual Program Statement (APS)
MCC utilizes its 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. In FY2021, MCC had 14 APS partnerships in implementation. Significant activities related to APS partnerships in fiscal year 2021 include:
- Initiation of a partnership with Bridges to Prosperity that will increase access to infrastructure by rural communities—specifically secondary schools in the San Pedro and Gbeke regions of Côte d’Ivoire—through last-mile pedestrian paths and bridges.
- Completion of a partnership with the University of Colorado to collect and use high-frequency monitoring data using emerging and cost-effective technologies to understand water availability in kiosks constructed by the District Metering Area and Standpipe Demonstration Activity in Sierra Leone. The partnership resulted in an ongoing commitment by the water utility company to maintain the sensors after the end of the threshold program and partnership with the University of Colorado, as well as the potential to scale up the use of the sensors for replication of the kiosk model in the future.
Program Partnership Solicitation (PPS)
MCC partner countries can now use the PPS to competitively select partners to implement program activities within compact and threshold programs. Significant activities related to PPS partnerships in FY2021 include:
- MCA-Morocco initiated a partnership with Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, OCP Solutions, and Atlas Cloud Services in the Workforce Development Activity to develop a digital platform for the labor market. This interactive platform aims to make labor market data more accessible and usable to policymakers and the public via real-time data and information on trends, supply and demand, skills, training and more.
- The Lesotho Millennium Development Agency in collaboration with the Lesotho Pension Fund is using the PPS to design a business-enabling environment and technical-assistance facility and financing vehicles that would catalyze domestic and international impact capital for investment in micro, small and medium enterprises in Lesotho’s key strategic sectors, including agriculture and high-value horticulture, creative industries, tourism and manufacturing—including women-owned or youth-owned businesses.
Partnership With USAID for Women’s Business Data Lab and e-Community in Côte d’Ivoire
MCC and Microsoft are partnering to establish a Women’s Data Lab and Network (WDLN) in Côte d’Ivoire to support women entrepreneurs and women-led small and medium enterprises (W-SMEs) with development of the digital skills and data savvy necessary to grow and scale their businesses. The WDLN, funded by USAID’s global fund on women’s economic empowerment, represents a first-of-its-kind partnership between MCC, Microsoft and other partners to grow an e-community of W-SMEs to build data skills and digital literacy—bringing meaningful results for business performance, technology enablement, job creation and global competitiveness.
Partnership With Women in Science (WiSci)
MCC is helping to empower the next generation of female leaders by bringing the 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 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, MCC, MCA-Morocco and MCA-Cote d’Ivoire helped to bring WiSci’s first virtual camp to participants from Morocco, Côte d’Ivoire and the United States in summer 2021. The WiSci Morocco online programming demonstrated the impact of the WiSci partnership and program model to MCC threshold programs and compacts.
Power Africa
To fulfill the agency’s goal of removing constraints to economic growth, MCC is undertaking major power programs 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 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 were placed 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 avoiding collection of already-available data. Through 2020, DCLI worked to improve data use at 23 PEPFAR-priority health facilities, embedding data fellows and developing technical solutions which can be scaled by the Ivorian Ministry of Health to other locations.
The DCLI program has highlighted the opportunity to empower women economically by providing them with the data skills needed 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 Stanford’s 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.
An independent assessment concluded that, overall, 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.