Written by: Courtney Carr

We’re excited to announce EnCompass’ new partnership with Mathematica on a 5-year contract with Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). The Gender and Social Inclusion Blanket Purchase Agreement (GSI BPA) will strengthen economic opportunities for women and other excluded groups, which is essential to achieving the mission to reduce poverty through economic growth. The GSI BPA provides an opportunity to support MCC in moving GSI objectives forward in service of sustainable economic gain for all. This BPA will also support and advance MCC’s data-driven model to remove the financial, legal, and cultural barriers that prevent women and other excluded groups from fully engaging in their countries’ economies.

Inequality and exclusion can inhibit efforts to promote economic growth and reduce poverty and decrease a country’s economic growth story. Research shows that the economic costs are high when the benefits of economic growth are unequally shared with women and other disadvantaged groups. MCC has been a strong partner for the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity Initiative, which works to advance women’s economic progress around the world. MCC’s GSI group takes the lead on ensuring countries identify, analyze, and address inequalities throughout every stage of program development and implementation. Producing rigorous and relevant gender and social inclusion data and conducting a variety of in-depth analyses will inform the design of MCC interventions and address inequalities and target the right activities.

EnCompass and Mathematica will provide a range of technical assistance for MCC compacts and threshold programs across sectors. Our team will conduct analyses to better understand contributors and constraints to intervention effectiveness and equity. We will also ensure availability of rigorous GSI data by identifying data gaps and quality and relevance issues, and by creating tools, guidance, and training to address and mitigate them. We will support training to produce rigorous evidence, and then interpret and use that evidence at each compact or threshold program phase and adapt approaches to respond to new evidence or complexities, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, while making sure women and other excluded groups remain able to access economic benefits of MCC interventions. These activities will strengthen our economic growth and development practice and build on best practices for GSI applied at USAID.

We look forward to working with Mathematica and MCC to build on the strengths of the current approaches and processes and collaboratively design solutions to include women and other excluded groups in economic growth. For more information about our work under this contract, visit our contracting vehicles page or contact Dr. Patricia T. Morris, Director of Gender and Inclusive Development (pmorris@encompassworld.com).