By Kemo Cham
After nearly nine years of efforts, Sierra Leone has finally been shortlisted as a recipient for the highest award in the United States government’s Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) programme.
The award of Compact was announced by President Julius Maada Bio on Tuesday in a tweet.
“I have been notified this evening that Sierra Leone is Compact eligible on our gains in control of corruption, democratic rights, and economic freedoms,” the president wrote, adding: “We look forward to strengthening our partnership with the American government.”
The MCC’s Country Director, Mathew Langhenry, also twitted:
“Today, the MCC Board unanimously approved Sierra Leone for a Compact. Congratulation Salone!”
The MCC is an independent aid agency of the US government, which rewards developing countries for promoting good governance and fighting poverty. This way, the agency which was founded in 2004, takes a different approach to foreign aid.
Eligible countries are assessed annually, based on 20 indicators, among them political freedom, fighting corruption and health spending. Fighting corruption is a so-called major hurdle, which a country must pass to be qualified for Compact.
The MCC signs either a Compact, which is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, or a Threshold agreement, which is a smaller funding, depending on their performance on these indicators.
The Compact is usually a five-year grant and the beneficiary country is at liberty to choose its most important development priority. The key is that the project to be funded targets reducing poverty and stimulating economic growth.
If a country does not have a passing score but has a positive, upward trend on the selection criteria, it can still be eligible for the Threshold programme, which is a smaller grant that is focused on policy and institutional reform.
The MCC’s Board of Directors meets once a year to select eligible country partners for that fiscal year. This meeting usually happens in December.
Sierra Leone’s score on the ranking began improving markedly in 2012, under former President Ernest Bai Koroma. That year the Board selected the country as eligible to develop a Compact, but by 2013 the decision was withdrawn amidst concerns of a drop in “transparency and efforts to combat corruption.”
President Bio, who came to power in 2018, campaigned on the platform of uprooting graft in the country. And over the last two years, the country has performed well in the scorecard partly thanks to its gain in the anti-corruption efforts, improving every year.
In 2015, Sierra Leone got a $44.4 million grant under the threshold programme, while its neighbour Liberia received $257 million Compact to help both countries recover from the Ebola crisis.
The latest scorecard was released in November 2020 and Sierra Leone passed 11 indicators, among them corruption.
Several countries are currently in their concluding phase of delivering lifesaving projects, using MCC funds, including provision of water, education, electricity, good healthcare.
Among the latest beneficiaries of the scheme is Mozambique, which was selected by the MCC Board of Directors in December 2019, the same time Kenya was selected for a Threshold.
Other past beneficiaries include Burkina Faso, Lesotho, Malawi, and Tunisia.
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