May 28-30, 2024

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May 28-30, 2024

Kaj Gass

Senior Operations Advisor, Agriculture

Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC)

Biography

Kaj Gass is Senior Operations Advisor for agriculture in MCC’s Land & Agricultural Economy practice group. Prior, he was Deputy Resident Country Director for MCC’s Niger compact. Kaj joined MCC’s LAE team in January 2018 and has served as the lead technical expert on issues related to agriculture and irrigation for four MCC compacts (Tunisia, Niger, Mozambique, and Senegal-Regional). In the last year of the Niger Compact, Kaj joined the Resident Country Mission in Niamey, including a period as Acting Resident Country Director. He is currently serving as the project lead for the Mozambique II’s Promoting Reform and Investment in Agriculture project, guiding the team to develop and introduce a major agricultural tax reform program. He has 15 years’ experience working in the US Government’s Interagency for agricultural development, focusing particularly on agricultural policy and reform. Kaj holds Crop Professional Certification from Purdue University and a Masters in Public Health from the University of Pittsburgh.

Appearances

Putting Evidence into Practice: Improving Agriculture and Land Tenure Investments

ICTforAg 2024 and Washington, D.C. 2024-05-28T12:30:00-06:00

The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), ranked for seven years in a row as the world’s most transparent bilateral development donor by The Aid Transparency Index, is a leader in being accountable for its investments and maintaining transparency in reporting its results. MCC, having invested over $2.3 billion in agriculture and land and property rights, strives to be a leader in reporting accurate data from monitoring projects and their evaluations.

As data quality is a cornerstone for evidence-based investing and decision-making, MCC has employed new modalities such as satellite imagery and remote sensing to increase the frequency and accuracy of data collection over household surveys, while also evaluating the effectiveness of traditional collection tools like crop cuts. Similarly, MCC has tried to support strong administrative data from its partner countries to increase efficiency in data collection and management by investing in digital data systems

This session will provide a brief background of MCC and its Agriculture and Land investments and describe the challenges faced in accurately capturing the impacts of these investments. Next, the MCC Team will introduce its efforts for improving its methods for measuring its projects such as using remote sensing and for promoting smart technology investment decision-making for land administration systems. Finally, the session will turn to how more accurate and timely data can not only better inform future MCC investment but also improve long-term management and use of these transformative investments.