Previous APS Opportunities

This funding opportunity closed on January 28, 2025. MCC seeks to partner with organizations that share our goal of achieving poverty reduction through economic growth. MCC’s Partnership Annual Program Statement (APS) is the agency’s primary mechanism to co-create, co-fund, and co-implement partnerships that support MCC’s ability to achieve our mission and programmatic goals. MCC seeks concept papers that bring new ideas, technologies, or practices to partner with us in addressing specific challenges or opportunities as outlined in the APS.

Primary Goal

This partnership seeks to enhance the capacity of development agencies to analyze and address constraints to economic growth in urban and subnational settings in low- and middle-income countries. Using MCC’s established growth diagnostics framework, the project will explore urbanization’s role in economic development, focusing on whether unproductive urban growth acts as a constraint and identifying solutions to foster productive, growth-enhancing cities.

Context

Urbanization in developing countries is accelerating, particularly in Africa, where urban populations are expected to triple by 2050. While urban areas can drive economic growth through agglomeration benefits and productivity gains, many cities in these regions fail to deliver expected outcomes, remaining "consumption cities" rather than "production cities." This gap necessitates tools and data to assess urbanization’s impact on growth and identify key constraints.

Opportunity

MCC seeks partners to refine its diagnostic framework by integrating urban-focused methodologies. The collaboration will:

1. Develop analytical approaches aligned with MCC’s growth diagnostic framework to evaluate urbanization-related constraints.
2. Collect and compile city-level data in two or three selected MCC partner countries.
3. Create economic dashboards for urban analysis to support diagnostics and future evaluations.
4. Publish findings and tools to benefit global development practitioners.

Benefits of Partnership

MCC brings two decades of expertise in targeted investments and growth diagnostics. By collaborating, partners will contribute to a global public good, producing scalable tools and data that enhance understanding of urbanization’s role in economic growth. Findings will be shared widely, influencing policy and improving urban development strategies.

This funding opportunity closed on January 28, 2025. MCC seeks to partner with organizations that share our goal of achieving poverty reduction through economic growth. MCC’s Partnership Annual Program Statement (APS) is the agency’s primary mechanism to co-create, co-fund, and co-implement partnerships that support MCC’s ability to achieve our mission and programmatic goals. MCC seeks concept papers that bring new ideas, technologies, or practices to partner with us in addressing specific challenges or opportunities as outlined in the APS.

Overview

The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) and the Government of Tanzania (GoT) are collaborating to design a 4-year Trade Facilitation Project under the MCC Threshold Program. The initiative aims to address the high cost of international trade in Tanzania, a critical barrier to economic growth and poverty reduction. The project seeks a partner to co-create and implement interventions that target key challenges: inefficient trade facilitation, persistent non-tariff barriers (NTBs), and weak trade governance institutions.

Primary Goal

The partnership will work to lower trade costs, improve policy coherence, and enhance trade facilitation mechanisms. This includes digitizing regulatory processes, improving standards for agricultural exports, strengthening inter-governmental coordination, and increasing public-private dialogue. Special attention will also be given to engaging women, youth, and underrepresented groups in trade policy development.

Scope of Activities

• Strengthening Inter-Governmental Coordination: Support action plans for the National Trade Facilitation Committee (NTFC) and the National Monitoring Committee for Non-Tariff Barriers (NMC-NTBs).
• Digitizing Regulatory Approvals: Assist the Tanzania Revenue Authority in streamlining certificates, licenses, and permits processes to create a unified electronic single window system.
• Improving Conformity Assessments: Enhance capacities of the Tanzania and Zanzibar Bureaus of Standards to meet international market requirements.
• Strengthening Public-Private Dialogue: Empower business and civil society organizations to influence trade policies.
• Increasing Inclusion: Amplify the voices of women and youth in trade policy discussions.
• Implementing Trade Agreements: Build a national trade negotiation team to ensure compliance with international agreements.

Why Partner?

This is a unique opportunity to collaborate with MCC, leveraging its two decades of development experience to achieve transformative impacts in Tanzania. By reducing trade barriers, the project can significantly boost exports, income, and GDP growth. Tanzania’s new trade policy and openness to private sector-led growth create a conducive environment for impactful reforms.

This partnership aims to enhance infrastructure resilience and sustainability by integrating engineered and natural solutions, with a focus on nature-based solutions (NbS) in developing countries. The main objective is to create a comprehensive manual of practice (MoP) for NbS in civil engineering, fostering standardized, science-based approaches. Current challenges include the lack of standardized metrics and the difficulty in integrating NbS into diverse environmental contexts. Through collaboration with strategic partners, the initiative seeks to promote widespread adoption of NbS, offering decision-making frameworks, educational resources, and improved business processes. This effort aims to enhance infrastructure resilience, environmental sustainability, and cost-effectiveness while facilitating knowledge sharing and capacity building among stakeholders.

Potential scope

The partnership will be funded by MCC up to $250,000 per year up to three years, with partner(s) contributing 25% cost share through expertise, authorship, and committee co-chairing in developing the MoP for NbS in civil engineering. The work will include:

1. Comprehensive Manual: Develop a MoP consolidating science-based methodologies and best practices for integrating NbS into civil engineering projects.
2. Technical Guidance: Provide expertise in performance-driven engineering methods, risk analysis, and sustainability metrics to create standardized approaches embedded in the MoP.
3. Capacity Building: Facilitate knowledge sharing among stakeholders through digital dissemination and publishing, aiming to enhance awareness and adoption of NbS.
4. Real-world Case Studies: Incorporate practical examples from MCC programs, including those in Mozambique, Sierra Leone, and Zambia, to illustrate successful NbS implementation.
5. Stakeholder Engagement: Engage engineers, policymakers, and practitioners to ensure the manual's relevance and advocate for NbS adoption through global networks and digital platforms.

Concept Paper Due Date: March 22, 2024, 12:00 pm ET

Estimated Federal Budget: $250,000 USD per year up to three years

To learn more about this partnership opportunity and how to submit a concept paper or submit questions, please see the detailed Partnership Opportunity Statement on grants.gov (see Full Announcement - APS NOFO No. 95332419N0001 v14).

Summary: MCC is presently working with the Government of Indonesia (GOI) to develop a compact including the following two projects in the priority provinces of North Sulawesi, South Sumatra, Bali, Riau Islands and Riau: (i) access to finance for infrastructure, particularly transport and logistics infrastructure, and (ii) access to finance for micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises (“MSMEs”), particularly those owned by women. MCC seeks a Learning Collaboration Partner with which to collaborate and jointly define and implement a shared learning agenda for collaboration that engages multiple stakeholders in Indonesia in the areas of financial inclusion for MSMEs and transportation planning. The Learning Collaboration Partner will collaborate with MCC staff in undertaking at a minimum one research effort involving data collection, analysis, and presentation, organizing quarterly meetings of the stakeholder forum in Indonesia and one effort to convene policy discussions on a specific policy recommendation arising from existing or planned research. Generally, the scope is expected to include the following two components that would apply to both topic areas (MSME access to finance, transport planning):

Research component

• Synthesizing existing research
• Enumerating stakeholder lists and gauging interest in continued participation
• Conducting new qualitative and or quantitative data collection efforts, particularly if additional funding sources become available to the partnership

Collaboration component

• Consistent, routine convening and presentation of evidence to stakeholders
• Periodic “conferences” or larger dissemination events of some sort
• Specific, focused advocacy efforts around particular policy priorities based on evidence and in collaboration with specific groups in the GOI and civil society.

The anticipated timeframe for the partnership(s) is three years.

• Concept Paper Due Date: April 25, 2022, 5:00 pm ET
• Estimated Federal Budget: $500,000 USD

The following organizations submitted Concept Papers in response to this partnership opportunity:

• The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), Massachusetts Institute of Technology

MCC invited the following organizations to Stage II: Co-Creation:

• The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Contact: Mr. Jamie Goldberg, Team Manager, Grant and Contract Administration, MIT

MCC awarded the partnership to:

•  The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Contact: Mr. Jamie Goldberg, Team Manager, Grant and Contract Administration, MIT

Summary: Collaborative research efforts in recent decades have brought about considerable advances across the development and scientific communities in understanding interactions between ecosystem services and economic activity, approaches to improved management and use of natural capital, and the benefits of increased resilience to the impacts of climate change. MCC is seeking a partnership on Integrated Environmental- Economic Modeling to advance the analytical frontier for integrated quantitative environmental and economic modeling in support of development planning. The aim of such modeling is to support a rigorous scenario-based characterization and order-of-magnitude quantification of environmental costs and benefits, especially those climate-related. To develop an initial proof of concept in advance of public domain applications, MCC seeks a technical partner to collaborate with MCC staff in undertaking the following anticipated activities:

1. Identifying an existing modeling framework or platform offering the essential functionalities on which this Partnership can build;
2. Articulating enhancements to the modeling framework’s specifications and capabilities that tailor its applicability to national-level analyses of constraints to growth as an element of development planning;
3. Refining, adapting, and augmenting the modeling framework to deliver outputs and insights addressing key questions arising in identifying and prioritizing constraints to growth; and
4. Developing a practical deployment plan.

The anticipated timeframe for the partnership(s) is three years.

• Concept Paper Due Date: April 18, 2022, 5:00 pm ET
• Estimated Federal Budget: $750,000 USD

The following organizations submitted Concept Papers in response to this partnership opportunity:

1. Cornell University
2. International Development and Research Associates (IDRA)
3. International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)
4. Millennium Institute (MI)
5. MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change
6. Regents of the University of Minnesota

MCC invited the following organizations to Stage II: Co-Creation:

1. MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. Contact: Ms. Jennifer Morris, Research Scientist, MIT

MCC awarded the partnership to: The partnership agreement is still pending.

Summary: MCC is seeking to partner with an international, West African regional or local Ivorian, or multiple organizations which come together to form a consortium, to finalize the design and implement the “Women’s Data Lab and Network” (WDLN) Project in support of local entrepreneurs in Côte d'Ivoire. MCC is specifically interested in organizations that work with small- and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) – particularly women-owned or women-led SMEs (W-SMEs) and female innovators and entrepreneurs – and are interested in taking ownership of the WDLN program, refining its focus, driving results and assuring its sustainability. The WDLN program aims to empower women entrepreneurs and W-SMEs with digital and data skills to effectively participate in the digital economy and grow their businesses. In addition, WDLN will provide tailored resources, access to business information and mentors, and encourage the creation of W-SME networks.

The WDLN intends to achieve this vision with and through one or more locally-rooted organizations, developing a program that is self-sustaining – agile and continuing beyond the approximate 3 years of funding. Through WDLN, MCC is seeking to achieve the following outcomes:

1. W-SMEs gain digital and data literacy skills and tools and use them to manage and grow their businesses.
2. W-SMEs grow and advance to the next stages of business maturity.
3. New W-SMEs emerge from a pipeline of female entrepreneurs.
4. A subset of W-SMEs benefit from Microsoft 4Afrika engagement and/or other regional programs.
5. The WDLN continues to support W-SMEs after the program ends.

Note: For this WDLN opportunity, MCC will host a virtual conference prior to the Phase I Concept Papers are due. This conference will occur on April 20, 2021 (Tuesday), 11:00am to 12:00pm ET. All applicants are encouraged to attend. Interested applicants shall email Mohammad K. Ayub, Agreement Specialist (contractor representing MCC), and Andrew E. Lee, Agreement Officer, by April 16, 2021, 11:59pm ET with the following information:

1. Entity name;
2. Attendee(s) name(s) and title(s);
3. Attendee(s) email address(es); and
4. Any questions you would like MCC to address during the conference.

MCC will send a meeting invite on April 19, 2021 (Monday) to those interested applicants.

• Concept Paper Due Date: May 7, 2021 (Now Closed)
• Estimated Federal Budget: $2,500,000 USD

The following organizations submitted Concept Papers in response to this partnership opportunity:

1. Adei Foundation
2. Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE)
3. Club Africain des Entrepreneurs
4. Dabre Family Services International (DFSI)
5. Entrepreneurial Solutions Partners (ESP)
6. Fondation SEPHIS
7. Génération Femmes du Troisième Millénaire (GFM3)
8. Groupe Addict
9. INOVIS
10. International Strategic Management, Inc. (ISM)
11. Ivoirian Federation of Small and Medium Enterprises (FIPME)
12. JS Group
13. Keeram Technologies, Inc.
14. Keizene
15. Mayocreation
16. MobiCycle
17. Swiss Association for Entrepreneurs in Emerging Markets (SAFEEM)
18. TechnoServe, Inc.

MCC invited the following organizations to Stage II: Co-Creation:

• Entrepreneurial Solutions Partners (ESP). Contact: Mr. Teddy ROUX, Project Lead, Director, West Africa, ESPartners
• Swiss Association for Entrepreneurs in Emerging Markets (SAFEEM). Contact: Doris Clemenz, Global Projects

MCC awarded the partnership to: The partnership agreement is still pending.

Summary: Isolation caused by lack of transportation infrastructure affects almost every facet of life for the rural poor. The scope of this proposed partnership is to identify and develop complimentary opportunities to increase access by rural poor to essential infrastructure and services. Potential partnership achievements include co-creation of novel tools that synthesize geospatial information systems with cost-benefit analyses and standardization of rural access infrastructure interventions such as rural schools. The primary goal of this partnership is to increase access to infrastructure by rural communities through last-mile pedestrian paths and bridges. MCC seeks partners with which to collaborate and jointly explore needs and potential solutions such as increased pedestrian access by future students (i.e., compact beneficiaries) of the New Secondary Schools for Equitable Access Sub-Activity of the compact with Côte d’Ivoire. The scope of this compact sub-activity includes the design, construction and equipping of between 74 and 84 new secondary schools, many of which are expected to be located in rural areas within the San Pedro and Gbeke regions of Côte d’Ivoire.

• Concept Paper Due Date: May 7, 2021 (Now Closed)
• Estimated Federal Budget: $335,000 USD

The following organizations submitted Concept Papers in response to this partnership opportunity:

1. Bridges to Prosperity

MCC invited the following organizations to Stage II: Co-Creation:

• Bridges to Prosperity

MCC awarded the partnership to:

• Bridges to Prosperity. Contact: Alissa Davis, Director of Business Development

Summary: The Government of the United States of America, via the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), and the Solomon Islands Government (SIG) expect to sign a Threshold Program Grant Agreement in 2021 totaling US $23 million to support a 4-year policy and institutional reform program that leads to a reduction in poverty through economic growth. The 4-year timeline for the Threshold program is expected to begin in 2021. Using this Partnership Opportunity Statement, MCC seeks a partner (henceforth referred to as the “Community Engagement Partner”) with which to collaborate and jointly define and implement an approach to achieve the Community Engagement objectives related to social license agreements between investors and communities around the use of land under the Accessing Land for Tourism Investment Facilitation (ALTIF) Project, Land Identification Activity. Achieving and maintaining agreements between an investor and community around social license is critical to the viability of any tourism investment in Solomon Islands; without agreement on social license that is long lasting and built on trust, no tourism investment will be viable. MCC seeks to partner with an organization that can work with communities in the Solomon Islands, the Solomon Islands Government, and other implementing partners to establish social license agreements around tourism investments.

• Concept Paper Due Date: May 21, 2021 (Now Closed)
• Estimated Federal Budget: To be discussed during Stage II, Co-Creation

The following organizations submitted Concept Papers in response to this partnership opportunity:

1. Live &Learn Environmental Education (Australia)
2. Tetra Tech

MCC invited the following organizations to Stage II: Co-Creation:

• Tetra Tech. Contact: Julie Grygiel, Director of Cost and Pricing

MCC awarded the partnership to: The partnership agreement is still pending

Summary: Fiscal policy is the most powerful tool democratic governments have to reduce poverty through growth. The analytic tools that MCC deploys to advance its mission focus on relaxing the binding constraints on economic growth, promoting efficiency through rigorous cost-benefit analysis, and achieving a required minimum rate of return. MCC seeks to partner with institutions that have specialized capacity and expertise with developing and deploying tools for fiscal analysis in low and lower-middle income countries. Through partnership, MCC aims to analyze the effects of public expenditure and revenue mobilization across income levels so that consideration of inclusiveness and poverty reduction potential can be better integrated into early project development; investigate opportunities to further disaggregate analysis of effects by region, gender, and other population characteristics to better inform decision making in project design and policy choice; incorporate these analyses during the project development process to ensure economic growth driven by investments is pro-poor, inclusive, and promotes gender equity; and expand learning opportunities across the development community regarding incidence analysis and the impact of policy design on development outcomes.

Due Date: May 18, 2020 (Now Closed)

Summary: MCC faces a demanding, yet opportune challenge: In order to effectively implement its core methodology – evidence-driven decision making – it must continually absorb and apply a burgeoning body of external evaluation and scientific evidence to inform and improve its investment decisions. MCC seeks to partner with one or more leading institutions to gain provide real-time engagement on available evidence and expertise related to evaluation and applied development economics to raise the quality and quantity of evidence used to inform MCC's evaluation and investment practices.

• Due Date: May 17, 2019 (Now Closed)

Summary: Rapidly improving the capabilities to process and analyze geospatial and earth-observation data by key country counterparts (i.e. local skill base), coupled with opening of significant data sets, have set the stage for important advancements in the use of this data for making better development decisions and driving economic outcomes. MCC has the opportunity to participate in these advancements and to use them to enhance its work by being open to partnering with those already working in this space, and to providing some co-funding for these opportunities. MCC is interested in collaborating with partners to enable the of use earth-observation and geospatial data sets by country-based stakeholders, as a way to innovate the methods used by the agency and its partner countries.

• Due Date: May 15, 2019 (Now Closed)

Summary: MCC seeks partners that would be interested in enabling greater collaboration among emerging data science training efforts and centers in Africa, such as the Tanzania Data Lab, the Sejen Virtual Lab in Cote d'Ivoire, a similar such center being considered in Lesotho, and the Kenyan "Africa Data hub" amongst others. Specifically, the partnership would seek to leverage third-party funds; tools, equipment and software; and/or expertise to support collaboration amongst these centers of data skill-building. Objectives of the collaboration would be to encourage standardization of the technology (systems, telepresence capabilities) and interoperability, enable uniform approaches to curriculum to help optimize cost and efficiency of training; and/or scale these efforts by supporting or seeding additional locations of data skill-building in strategic locations, and ensure social inclusion. As data supply, technology, mobile assets continue to increase, this partnership would provide a much needed coordination and scaling of efforts to build a data culture and data science skills in Africa.

• Due Date: May 15, 2019 (Now Closed)

Summary: Summary: MCC seeks partners interested in working with us to help MCC successfully and sustainably address the barriers to women's (and ideally youth) entrepreneurship and sustainable business growth in compact countries, starting with Lesotho, Tunisia and Timor-Leste. MCC would like to work in partnership to adapt and test models and tools in Lesotho, Timor-Leste and potentially Tunisia, contributing to MCC's due diligence in the development of interventions. MCC is interested in testing options for interventions that could, through subsequent activity, be scaled up and evaluated at a later stage of the compact. Ideally, impact evaluation planning would also be part of this due diligence work so that the work can contribute to a broader learning agenda. This might include economic analysis to estimate ex-ante and ex-poste the benefits to individuals and households from interventions.

• Due Date: May 15, 2019 (Now Closed)

Summary: MCC seeks partners to enhance analytical capabilities in various subfields of environmental and natural resource economics, including water resources, natural resource accounting, and climate change. The wide array of research findings, experiential knowledge, and analytical and empirical tools in these subject matter areas has expanded dramatically in recent years. Such resources include geospatial data, analytical frameworks and models, computing and communications technologies, and algorithms. MCC wishes to partner to more effectively access cross-disciplinary advances in modeling climate impacts and ecosystems services benefits. MCC seeks, moreover, to more systematically integrate these considerations in the agency's project assessment methods and economic analyses while contributing to the broader advancement of environmental economics in international development.

• Due Date: May 17, 2019 (Now Closed)

Summary: MCC seeks co-funders and consortia partners to blend resources and work jointly on enabling the use of data by and for women's economic empowerment in partner countries, and initially in Cote d'Ivoire and Lesotho. The "use of data" in this context pertains to a broad spectrum of activities from simple numeracy and data literacy to data preparation, visualization, and complex data analytics and data science, irrespective of sectors since the tools and methods to process and analyze data at each level are transferable – and aims to increase the fraction of women with skills in the growing global digital economy.

• Due Date: May 15, 2019 (Now Closed)