Sierra Leone now Partly Free in Press Freedom

This year is the 10th anniversary of MCC’s founding. I am especially grateful to share this milestone with this subcommittee and your colleagues, without whose support we would not be so successful. The bipartisan decision to launch MCC was a brave one, and no one knew whether the experiment would work.

Was it possible to select partner countries based on solid, objective evidence of their commitment to good governance, economic freedom and investing in their people?

Could you really run development like a business, using rigorous economic analysis to decide which investments in those countries would have the biggest impact – and then doing independent evaluations to find out if they really worked?

And would poor countries truly be able to take ownership of these investments, and ensure the money was not wasted or diverted?

Ten years later, I am happy to report that the experiment has been a success, and that the trust you put in this new approach to aid effectiveness has paid off. Over the past decade, we have signed 27 compacts which are expected to benefit almost 174 million people worldwide. Of those 27 signed compacts, 15 have been signed with African countries, totaling close to $6 billion. These partnerships span the continent and include Benin, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Ghana, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Senegal, Tanzania and Zambia.

Behind every number is a person who benefits from MCC’s investment. These include the women in Burkina Faso, Mali and Mozambique whose names can now appear on land titles, paving the way for them to be economic agents of change. These are the patients at new health clinics in Lesotho and students at schools in Ghana. And these are families with better access to clean water for drinking or irrigation for citizens of Cabo Verde, Zambia, Mozambique, Mali, Senegal and Ghana. All of these meet the agency’s strict requirements for only doing projects that promote economic growth.

There's a key point here that should be noted by the rat and his operatives who refuse to accept that their bid to get their paws on the US tax payers' money was a total failure especially when it comes to corruption in the land of the smoke and mirrors rat of a President.

Corruption in any country is an unacceptable tax on economic growth, and an obstacle to the private sector investment needed to reduce poverty. Corruption hinders economic growth by increasing costs, lowering productivity, discouraging investment, and reducing confidence in public institutions. American businesses seeking out opportunities abroad want environments that are free from corruption and conducive to job creation. Policymakers – including this Subcommittee -- want to be sure that investments of U.S. tax dollars are not susceptible to corruption.

Fighting corruption has always been a cornerstone of MCC’s approach to poverty reduction. MCC evaluates prospective partner countries based on how they perform on the agency’s annual scorecards, comprising 20 third-party indicators. By requiring countries to pass the Control of Corruption indicator in order to pass our scorecard, we seek to ensure our partners share this commitment. We also work to combat corruption in our partner countries through our poverty-reduction programs, where appropriate. And we take stringent measures to prevent, detect, and respond to instances of possible corruption as our compacts are implemented. These measures have been adopted by some of our country partners in their own government procurement systems.

For FY 2015, MCC would use $766 million of our $1 billion request for compact assistance to Liberia, Morocco, Niger, and Tanzania. All four countries are currently developing compact proposals for approval by MCC’s Board of Directors. These countries, home to nearly 100 million people combined, are among the world’s poorest, but each has taken significant steps to improve governance and achieve eligibility for MCC compact assistance. The increase in funding will support significant compact investments in these countries to unlock key constraints to economic growth, incentivize policy and institutional reforms necessary for private investment, and improve the well-being of some of the world’s poorest people.

Long live press freedom.