After two years of working with the US development agency, the Millennium Challenge Cooperation, today the government of Belize finally signed a 5-year grant agreement for 125 million US dollars.

It's one of the largest grants Belize has ever received, and according to Prime Minister John Briceno, it took a lot of deliberation to determine where the funds should be used:

John Briceno, Prime Minister
"Over the past two years our teams have engaged in rigorous research and development to determine the initiatives that would have the highest impact for our country and our citizens. We have conducted feasibility studies and engaged extensively with stakeholders from both the public and private sector to ensure that our approach is not only comprehensive but also broad. after in-depth examinations, we determined that education and energy would be the two sectors of focus under this compact."

The end goal of the grant will be to increase the number of post-primary graduates and to decrease the cost of electricity in Belize. MCC's CEO Alice Albright explained their plans to achieve this.

Alice Albright, CEO, MCC
"By investing 74 million of the compact in the education part of it, we call the education project, we open up so many opportunities to bring relevant labor market skills to post primary graduates. So how are we going to do it? We're going to fundamentally reshape, working together, teaching and learning and secondary education, we're going to improve access and we're going to enhance the quality and the relevance of technical and vocational training so that the youth of Belize will be prepared, I should say, for the rest of the 21st century."

"The energy project will total 21 million dollars and will support expansion plans for utility scale renewable energy while maintaining the stability of the grid. This will accommodate the supply of power without compromising the reliability and power quality. A particular exciting part of this project is the use of what we call blended finance which is bringing together different types of financing to catalyze what we hope will be another 50 million dollar of private sector investments in the energy sector. We are confident when all is said and done this project will result in another 50 megawatts of new power purchase agreements for low cost renewable generation."

And while this plan sounds good on paper, it has some members of the public skeptical. The main question being asked is what will the US get in return - after all, 250 million Belize dollars is no small amount. The PM assured Belizeans that there is no under the table deal.

John Briceno, Prime Minister
"There's no hidden agenda with this agreement. It's open, it's transparent and we have not signed any secret agreement with the United States government to be able to get this compact. It's just, we have met, we qualified for it and we're very proud, as what Albright said earlier, we're the only one in the region that's qualified and it speaks volumes to our government and to our country."

Alice Albright, CEO, MCC
"We have an eligibility framework at MCC that guides us in the decision of which country we choose to work with and its really our board of directors and leading up to December 2021, Belize was considered eligible to work with MCC and our board of directors chose to work with Belize on that basis. And so that was really the origin of the decision. We have signed an agreement and the agreement includes a number of details about the nature of the work that we will be in partnership with the government of Belize on. Part of it is on education, part of it is on energy, and there are mutual expectations of both partners but they are really surrounding the project that is at hand."

And Albright also outlined what the oversight will look like for this project:

Alice Albright, CEO, MCC
"The contours and the details and the parameters of the compact have been determined together working with the government and that forms the large majority of what is in the compact document so those documents are available. We work and this is something that is very unique about how MCC works is we then have a very close working relationship between the agency in Washington, the one or two people who will posted here and then the entity that will be set up and that team will then work on implementing the agreement and there are various guidelines and parameters that all MCC grants needs to observe and how certain aspects of administration, of implementation, of procurement and so forth are handled but the oversight and implementation will be very much a joint effort, a joint partnership between our folks in Washington and the entity that will be set up here."

And the US Ambassador emphasized that this project advances l the interest of Belizeans:

Michelle Kwan, US Ambassador To Belize
"Most of the work to implement this work on the ground will be done by Belizeans for Belizeans. And after all the lasting impacts of this agreement will be felt on Albert Street, not on Wall Street."

The implementation of this project is expected to commence in 2025.

We should note that questions in the press conference were confined only to the MCC grant.