CEO’s First Public Outreach Meeting

Ambassador Danilovich, the MCC's new CEO, has officially hit the DC ground running. Yesterday, he hosted his first public outreach meeting, where he publicly affirmed his commitment to selecting fewer countries and giving them much larger compacts in the hopes of fulfilling his corporation's 'transformational' goal in compact countries. He, with assistance from John Hewko (Vice President for Country Programs), Sherri Kraham (Director for Development Policy) and Kevin Saba (Managing Director for the Threshold Program), briefly discussed FY06 eligible countries and threshold country selection as well as his longer-term vision for the MCC. Some highlights from the meeting:• A number of organizational changes have already taken place. Matt McLean, formerly of the House International Relations Committee, has joined the MCC as Danilovich's Chief of Staff. Rodney Bent, formerly of the House Appropriations Committee (Foreign Operations Subcommittee), has been named the Vice President for the newly merged department of policy and international relations (PIR), grouping together international relations, development policy and the threshold program. There are also ongoing discussions on merging M&E, fiscal accountability and environmental and social impact assessment operations into a single department. What happens to the agricultural infrastructure and financial section was less clear, but it sounded like they were to be merged into country programs to create an operations branch (we will be following the organizational changes over the next few weeks and we’ll keep you posted).• The MCC publicly announced that Yemen's threshold eligibility has been suspended for this year (without going into what exactly a suspension means), and East Timor, Burkina Faso, and Tanzania have graduated from the threshold program this year to become MCC Compact-eligible countries.• Armenia, Benin and Vanuatu Compacts are expected to be finalized before the winter holiday.• Although 3 LMIC countries have been selected for FYO6 eligibility, Danilovich cautioned that the MCC should enter into the lower-middle income group very carefully and slowly, focusing much more of its attention on the low income group.• The MCC is discussing holding a summit with compact countries and eligible countries in the hopes of providing FY06 eligible countries with lessons learned on how to develop successful Compact proposals.Despite these interesting developments, the meeting left me with more questions than answers. The audience seemed to be filled in large part with consultants out looking for business, with much of the Q and A focused there, while more strategic issues--such as what general guiding principles exist (or should be developed) in actually selecting threshold countries, and whether the Board considered introducing a democracy hurdle in future selection processes--were left under explored.