The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) Board of Directors faces a critical decision next month: it must determine whether to continue certain countries' eligibility for grants for important development projects. The MCC's credibility is on the line. Will it stick with its time-tested and successful procedures for selecting well-performing countries - all of its procedures, and not a simplistic and rigid misunderstanding of them? Or will it miss the mark and tell deserving countries that were selected last year— and that have worked very hard over the past year based on that commitment— that they are now out simply because of misinterpretations of minor statistical fluctuations? For the MCC's sake and the sake of the people in the partner countries, let's hope wisdom prevails and the board sticks with its principles and chooses the former.
The MCC was established in 2004 as a different kind of development agency. The core idea was to select a subset of developing countries that had shown a strong commitment to good governance and sound economic and social policies, and then to work in close partnership with those countries to undertake investments with a high payoff for economic growth and poverty reduction.
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