About MCC

Millennium Challenge Corporation is committed to delivering sustainable economic growth and poverty reduction throughout the entire lifecycle of its investments.

The challenge

How can we use data to fight poverty?

The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) is an innovative and independent U.S. foreign aid agency that is helping lead the fight against global poverty. Created by the U.S. Congress in January 2004 with strong bipartisan support, MCC has changed the conversation on how best to deliver smart U.S. foreign assistance by focusing on good policies, country ownership, and results. MCC provides time-limited grants promoting economic growth, reducing poverty, and strengthening institutions.

MCC Logo MCC is committed to delivering sustainable economic growth and poverty reduction throughout the entire lifecycle of its investments. Information communication technology (ICT) and the digital and data revolutions are changing the development landscape – and how we work at MCC. More data is available than ever before and we need this multi-sector, real-time data and the enabling technologies to optimize the design, implementation and sustainability of MCC compacts, thresholds, and the partnership which we undertake. At the same time, MCC recognizes a growing need to ensure that government, non-government organizations (NGOs), implementation partners, and civil society in our partner countries have the data, technology and innovations skills needed to maximize the impact from our investments – and to leverage the digital data revolution to drive their own development priorities.

The digital and data revolutions are also changing how we engage with others in support of our mission. Increasingly, MCC is supporting partner governments in implementing digital government systems to achieve a variety of goals including enhanced customer service, streamlined billing and reduced administrative burdens, greater transparency and anti-corruption, as well investments in the digital and ICT infrastructure and systems needed to support economic growth. In summary, data and increased use of data for decision-making, digital systems, and information and communication technologies are changing the way MCC plans, implements, monitors, evaluates and partners, as well as changing the future of our work and drivers of sustainable economic growth.

MCC engages in policy and/or technical components of programs aimed at alleviating constraining policies that hinder:

• Competitive and transparent access to data, ICT and related technologies
• Data-driven improvements in infrastructure
• Skill building and human capital development
• Improvements in government services (Digital Government) and public infrastructure and platforms
• Technology-enabled surveys, tracking which is material to the efforts