Over the past decade, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—a series of development and investment projects across Central Asia, Africa, and South America—has extended more than $182 billion in loans to 49 African countries, building roads, railways, ports, and power facilities with few governance conditions attached. These finance projects have positioned China as Africa’s largest lender, with 30 of 49 African countries now on interest payments than on public health.

This debt has become a geopolitical exploit for China, especially in regions like the Sahel where security and economic vulnerabilities are increasingly urgent. But it also presents a critical opening for the U.S. to demonstrate a different approach that prioritizes accountability, partnership, and sustainable economic growth.

The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) is a smart, strategic tool of the United States that helps create the conditions for global stability, economic prosperity, and strategic competitiveness with China. Created by the Millennium Challenge Corporation Act of 2003, the MCC is a government agency that helps drive government finance and private capital into projects abroad that promote economic growth, reduce poverty, and strengthen institutions. Before a country enters a five-year compact agreement—the structure in which the majority of MCC’s work is designed—they undergo a 20-indicator scorecard evaluation across three pillars: investing in people, economic freedom, and ruling justly.

MCC’s scorecard helps ensure a country is committed to decreasing corruption and ruling democratically. The investment process begins with the partner country first identifying their priorities and developing a MCC proposal that demonstrates, if a compact is signed, there will be an ecosystem of independent audits and transparent reporting already in place. Since its founding, MCC has committed approximately $17 billion across 47 countries, with programs expected to benefit nearly 400 million people.

In the past year, the MCC has announced new compact developments in South America, the Pacific, and West Africa, a sign that the effective model maintains bipartisan support. Partner governments must make difficult political reforms, fighting corruption, strengthening institutions, and overhauling land rights, on the basis of American commitments. China’s BRI loans require none of that. The MCC’s conditions for investment are not superfluous; they are the necessary ingredient to create the stable political and business environment necessary for long-term economic development with countries that could serve as important future trading partners.

Two-thirds of MCC’s portfolio is invested in Africa, accounting for over $10 billion across 24 countries. Active 5-year compacts are currently underway in Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Malawi, and Lesotho, and other countries. Threshold programs, agreements with promising countries to assist them in becoming compact eligible, are currently active in Kenya, Togo, and The Gambia. These investments target the constraints that hold economies back: poor roads that isolate farmers from markets, unreliable energy that limits businesses, and land rights gaps that suppress investment.

This focus on Africa is a strategic investment in a rapidly developing population, resource-rich with the critical minerals that are important for technology and America’s national security. Twelve of the twenty fastest-growing economies in the world are in Africa, and “By the middle of this century, one in every four people on Earth will be African” as World Bank President Ajay Banga has said. Africa’s middle class is projected to reach one billion people by 2060. These African nations are tomorrow’s consumers, trading partners, and allies, if the United States can harness its diplomatic and development tools in this narrow window to shape those relationships before our rivals do.

What separates the MCC from other international assistance programs and China’s lending model is its strict 5-year exit strategy. As Gary R. Edson, the Deputy National Security Advisor to President George W. Bush, and one of the creators of the MCC stated in 2024, “Let’s be clear. MCC shouldn’t exist twenty years from now. The business of MCC is to put itself out of business.”

Every compact has a fixed five-year timeline, transparent benchmarks, and independent evaluation, designed not to sustain an aid relationship but to end one. The goal of every compact is to ultimately transition countries from aid to trade partners and allow the investments in infrastructure and governance to create opportunities for American business and finance to flourish. America has a long history of success here, with 13 of our 15 largest export markets today having once been recipients of U.S. assistance. As USGLC articulates in its Blueprint for America to Succeed in the World, MCC’s compact model represents a critical component of America’s strategy to harness every tool of U.S. national and economic security to advance our interests at home and abroad.

In this moment of great-power competition with China, and on the eve of our nation’s 250^th birthday, the U.S. has an opportunity to provide a more durable alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative that creates opportunity for our international partners, while building a stronger, more prosperous America at home.