Education Loses Ground as Energy Gains in MCC Deal

After months of limbo, Belize’s Millennium Challenge Compact is moving ahead, but with a new shape. The hundred-and-twenty-five‑million-dollar U.S. deal survived tough talks with the new U.S. administration, but at a cost: less money for education and a bigger push into energy. Education funding drops from seventy-four million to fifty-four million U.S. dollars, while energy almost doubles, from twenty-one million to forty-two million US dollars. Foreign Affairs Minister Francis Fonseca says the shift was necessary to keep the agreement alive and insists Belize still stands to gain. Now, with the deal back on track, the focus turns to delivering results under the revised plan.

 

Francis Fonseca, Minister of Foreign Affairs

“Obviously as the Minister of Education, I was very happy with the original structure of the plan, the COMPACT, which saw about eighty percent of the funds going into education and twenty into energy. Now it is about sixty/forty. Sixty into education. A new administration came into the U.S. They wanted to review the MCC. For a while we were in limbo. We did not know whether the COMPACT would continue. That was under review. We are very happy that we were able, through discussion, to get them to agree to continue the program. And in that process we had to make certain compromises. And one of them was that we had to shift more funds into the energy sector plan and less into education.”

 

Fonseca says Belize made tough compromises to keep the MCC alive, and now the challenge is turning that revised deal into real results.

 

Attention readers: This online newscast is a direct transcript of our evening television broadcast. When speakers use Kriol, we have carefully rendered their words using a standard spelling system.

 

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