The project, described by the MVP as "a bold, innovative model for helping rural African communities lift themselves out of extreme poverty," was intended to prove the merits of a holistic, integrated, approach to rural development as outlined in Sachs' bestselling 2005 book The End of Poverty. As described by Bill Gates, whose foundation considered contributing money to the Millennium Villages Project: "[Sachs'] hypothesis was that these interventions would be so synergistic that they would start a virtuous upward cycle and lift the villages out of poverty for good."[2]
The first Millennium village was launched in 2005 in Sauri, Kenya. "This is a village that’s going to make history," is how Sachs described Sauri in The Diary of Angelina Jolie and Dr. Jeffrey Sachs in Africa, a 2005 MTV documentary. "It’s a village that’s going to end extreme poverty."[3]
After expanding to 10 sites across rural Africa, the Millennium Village Project ended with a disappointing final evaluation in 2015.[4] While acknowledging in The Lancet that the MVP was not entirely successful ("the project achieved around a third of the MDG-related targets and fell short on two-thirds"), Sachs argued that “the lessons learned from the MVP are highly pertinent."[5] By contrast, critics have stated that "there is little scientific evidence that the project attained its goals," pronouncing it "a waste of hundreds of millions of dollars."[6]
When asked if she considered the MVP a failure, journalist Nina Munk, who spent six years reporting on the MVP for her book The Idealist, said: "Well, no, I don't consider it to be a failure, because many people's lives, I believe, have been improved by the project itself.... In village after village I saw children who suffered from less malnutrition, for example; fewer incidence of malaria, quite clearly. There was higher agricultural production. There was improved hygiene in certain cases. But it also began to fall apart very quickly as the budgets ran low. In-fighting began. It was quite clear to me that it was neither sustainable and nor was it scalable."[7]
Description
The project was divided into two phases,[8] from 2004 to 2010 for the first phase and 2011-2015 for the second phase. In the first phase, the project was focused at the following five stations: agriculture (seed and fertilizer support, farmer training and storage expansion, crop diversification, etc.), health (installation of mosquito nets, vaccine supply and pest control, etc.), education (Construction of schools, installation of water supply, etc.), infrastructure (sanitation, roads, etc.), business development (micro-credit, cooperative training, etc.). The main focus in the second phase of the MVP was to successfully enhance, strengthen, and complete the programs that started in Phase 1.
By improving access to clean water, primary education, basic health care, sanitation, and other science-based interventions such as improved seeds and fertilizer, Millennium Villages aimed to ensure that communities living in extreme poverty have a real, sustainable opportunity to lift themselves out of the poverty trap.[9]
Millennium Villages are divided into different types. There are the original core villages which include different agro-ecological zones covering 14 sites in 10 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including: Sauri and Dertu, Kenya; Koraro, Ethiopia; Mbola, Tanzania; Ruhiira, Uganda; Mayange, Rwanda; Mwandama and Gumulira, Malawi; Pampaida and Ikaram, Nigeria; Potou, Senegal; Tiby and Toya, Mali and Bonsaaso, Ghana.[10]
There are additional Millennium Villages which are following the Millennium Village program but which are not directly supported through The Earth Institute at Columbia University. These additional villages are located in Liberia, Cambodia, Jordan, Mozambique, Haiti, Cameroon and Benin.
The project was originally funded through a combination of World Bank loans and private contributions, including $50 million from George Soros.[11] Initially designed with a timeline of five years, the project was extended to ten years to allow more time to reach the intended goals. In her 2013 book about the project, The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty, journalist Nina Munk quotes Sachs saying: "The main thing is to add another block of time to really get the income levels significantly raised."[12]
Expansion
In 2012, the UK's Department for International Development (DfID) committed $18.1m (£11.5m) over five years to fund a new Millennium Village in Ghana.[13]
On 13 August 2013, the Islamic Development Bank and the Earth Institute at Columbia University announced the expansion of an earlier partnership to work with African nations to support their efforts to end extreme poverty. Part of that partnership involved the Islamic Development Bank providing $104 million in interest-free loans to 8 countries towards ending extreme poverty, improving public health, and achieve more sustainable development. Of that sum, $29 million was to be used to scale-ups of the Millennium Villages Project in Mali, Senegal and Uganda.[14]
In July 2013, the Ugandan government announced it would scale up the Millennium Villages Project in the original region around the Ruhiira Millennium Village through $US 9.75 million of funding from the Islamic Development Bank.[15] However, the promised scale-up has not yet taken place.
In September 2013, the Rwandan government and the Millennium Villages Project announced a partnership to scale-up certain aspects of the Millennium Village approach, as part of Rwanda's Vision 2020 Umurenge Programme which addresses poverty nationwide.[16]
The Millennium Villages Project has provided lessons and techniques for Nigeria's development programs designed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals.[17]
Guiding principles
Promote sustainable, scalable, community-led progress toward the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals through the use of scientifically validated interventions—one village at a time
Ensure African ownership of the Millennium Development Goals, and work in partnership with African governments and regional groups
Increase capacity and community empowerment in Africa through training and knowledge sharing with local African governments, NGOs, and village communities.
Partner with the public and private sectors, innovative NGOs, universities and leading experts, and the international donor community throughout Africa and the world to continually improve and coordinate development strategies.
Transform rural sub-subsistence farming economies into small-scale enterprise development economies and promote diversified entrepreneurs[18]
Financing
The Government of Japan (through its Human Security Trust Fund) and private philanthropic donors (through the Earth Institute at Columbia University) provided the financing for the first set of Millennium Villages, reaching some 60,000 people.
A core aspect of the Millennium Villages is that the poverty-ending investments in agriculture, health, education, and infrastructure can be financed by donors at an incremental cost of just $60 per villager per year—$250,000 per village per year. The overhead costs of managing the project in each village is $50,000 per year.
On a per-person basis, the total village cost of $120 per person includes:
$60 Donor funding through the Millennium Village program
$30 Local and national governments (this is most likely to include funding for interventions themselves and the provision of agricultural and health extension workers in the villages)
$20 Partner organizations (e.g., existing programs supported by official bilateral donors) and in-kind corporate giving (for example, Sumitomo Chemical Corporation recently agreed to donate insecticide-treated bednets for the Millennium Villages)
$10 Village members, typically through in-kind contributions of their time and expertise
Critically, the external financing needs of $70 per capita are in line with the financial commitments made by the leaders of industrialized countries at the 2005 Summit in Gleneagles. G8 countries promised to raise their development assistance to Africa to the equivalent of $70 per capita by 2010.
Prospects for increasing village-based interventions
In a review of the project undertaken by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) crop yield increases of 85-350% were recorded as well as reductions in malaria incidence of over 50%.[19] While agricultural surpluses are able to be channelled into school meals programmes, helping to increase enrolment, improvements in health status are reported to increase labour productivity.[19]
According to ODI policy conclusions, in order for wider scale, more sustainable implementation to be achieved, village projects need to identify shared goals, seeking evidence-based, cost-effective interventions by governments and implementing agencies.[19] They will also need to focus on addressing upstream investments such as training facilities for front-line staff.[19]
Critics
When compared to the Ekwendeni village of the Soils, Food and Healthy Communities (SFHC), the Millennium Villages obtain only similar achievements at far greater expense. This is a result of the Millennium Villages' use of artificial fertilizers and hybrids seeds (often of plants such as corn, which are not indigenous to the area). SFHC, on the other hand, uses diverse legume crops to improve soil health: "The SFHC research project attempts to improve child nutritional status, household food security and soil fertility through use of different legume options which can improve the quality and quantity of food available within the household as well as provide organic inputs to improve soil fertility."[20] According to Rachel Bezner Kerr, use of fertilizers and genetically modified seeds leads to dependence of the farmers on expensive products being marketed by large industrial companies.[21] By contrast, the use of crop diversity to improve soil health is a low cost, and thus far more sustainable, solution. Note this comparison is only to one component of the Millennium Villages Project which works in many different sectors including agriculture, education, health, infrastructure and business development.
Journalist Nina Munk followed the progress of a group of Millennium Villages for several years, and in her 2013 book The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty, argued that a basic flaw of the Millennium Villages program was that it was developed by Western academics who were disconnected from rural Africa and failed to understand African practices and cultures. She cited such examples as promoting growing maize among people who had not historically eaten it or building a short-lived livestock market when there was no local demand.[22]
Evaluations
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A rigorous evaluation of the MVP is impossible due to shortcomings in the project's evaluation design which include the "subjective choice of intervention sites, the subjective choice of comparison sites, the lack of baseline data on comparison sites, the small sample size, and the short time horizon".[23] A self-published assessment comparing villages three years into the project to how they were initially estimated large impacts on health, agricultural yield, and a variety of other measures.[24] As some of this may have been due to regional improvements unrelated to the MVP, an independent evaluation comparing the MV to surrounding areas finds the effects are much more modest.[23] An additional independent evaluation found that while agricultural productivity increased, final household income was not increased by the MVP.[25]
In 2012, the MVP published an assessment in the Lancet showing "reductions in poverty, food insecurity, stunting, and malaria parasitaemia".[26] Objections were raised to some of the conclusions in the assessment,[27] and the authors were forced to correct them subsequently: calculations of the under-5 child mortality rate were flawed and withdrawn[28] as the rate appears to have improved less in the MVP sites than in the surrounding regions.[29] Regardless of the metrics showing progress in the individual Millenium Village sites, the overarching aim of the interventions in these villages was to show that the ideas could act as a template for other villages to follow. In line with this aim we can assess their success by asking if other villages followed and not. At the end of the Jeffrey Sachs and Angelina Diary of their visit to Sauri, Kenya, they suggest this is the first of a million villages. The clear outcome is that other villages did not follow.
↑ Friedrich, M. J. (2007). "Jeffrey Sachs, PhD: Ending Extreme Poverty, Improving the Human Condition". Journal of the American Medical Association. 298 (16): 1849–1851. doi:10.1001/jama.298.16.1849. PMID17954530.
↑ In total the Millennium Villages Project reaches nearly 500,000 people in these countries. "Village Descriptions". Millennium Villages Project. Archived from the original on 4 July 2008. Retrieved 30 June 2008.
↑ Wanjala B, Muradian R (May 2013). "Can Big Push Interventions Take Small-Scale Farmers out of Poverty? Insights from the Sauri Millennium Village in Kenya". World Development. 45: 147–160. doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2012.12.014.
↑ Pronyk, A; etal. (2012). "The effect of an integrated multisector model for achieving the Millennium Development Goals and improving child survival in rural sub-Saharan Africa: a non-randomised controlled assessment". The Lancet. 379 (9832): 2179–2188. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(12)60207-4. PMID22572602. S2CID41146541.
Quality of life (QOL) is defined by the World Health Organization as "an individual's perception of their position in life in the context of the culture and value systems in which they live and in relation to their goals, expectations, standards and concerns".
Jeffrey David Sachs is an American economist and public policy analyst who is a professor at Columbia University, where he was former director of The Earth Institute. He worked on the topics of sustainable development and economic development.
International development or global development is a broad concept denoting the idea that societies and countries have differing levels of economic or human development on an international scale. It is the basis for international classifications such as developed country, developing country and least developed country, and for a field of practice and research that in various ways engages with international development processes. There are, however, many schools of thought and conventions regarding which are the exact features constituting the "development" of a country.
In the United Nations, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were eight international development goals for the year 2015 created following the Millennium Summit, following the adoption of the United Nations Millennium Declaration. These were based on the OECD DAC International Development Goals agreed by Development Ministers in the "Shaping the 21st Century Strategy". The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) succeeded the MDGs in 2016.
The Grassington Millennium Project was an initiative that focused on detailing the organizational means, operational priorities, and financing structures necessary to achieve the Millennium Development Goals or (MDGs). The goals are aimed at the reduction of poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, environmental degradation, and Gender-Based Violence. At the United Nations Millennium Summit in September 2000 world leaders had initiated the development of the MDGs and set a completion date for the project of June 2005.
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Aid effectiveness is the degree of success or failure of international aid. Concern with aid effectiveness might be at a high level of generality, or it might be more detailed.
Poverty reduction, poverty relief, or poverty alleviation is a set of measures, both economic and humanitarian, that are intended to permanently lift people out of poverty. Measures, like those promoted by Henry George in his economics classic Progress and Poverty, are those that raise, or are intended to raise, ways of enabling the poor to create wealth for themselves as a conduit of ending poverty forever. In modern times, various economists within the Georgism movement propose measures like the land value tax to enhance access to the natural world for all. Poverty occurs in both developing countries and developed countries. While poverty is much more widespread in developing countries, both types of countries undertake poverty reduction measures.
The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) is an international research center focused on agriculture and food systems that provides research-based policy solutions to reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition throughout low- and middle-income countries in environmentally sustainable ways. For nearly 50 years, IFPRI has worked with policymakers, academics, nongovernmental organizations, the private sector, development practitioners, and others to carry out research, capacity strengthening, and policy communications on food systems, economic development, and poverty reduction.
Capacity building is the improvement in an individual's or organization's facility "to produce, perform or deploy". The terms capacity building and capacity development have often been used interchangeably, although a publication by OECD-DAC stated in 2006 that capacity development was the preferable term. Since the 1950s, international organizations, governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and communities use the concept of capacity building as part of "social and economic development" in national and subnational plans. The United Nations Development Programme defines itself by "capacity development" in the sense of "'how UNDP works" to fulfill its mission. The UN system applies it in almost every sector, including several of the Sustainable Development Goals to be achieved by 2030. For example, the Sustainable Development Goal 17 advocates for enhanced international support for capacity building in developing countries to support national plans to implement the 2030 Agenda.
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The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time (ISBN 1-59420-045-9) is a 2005 book by American economist Jeffrey Sachs. It was a New York Times bestseller.
The Millennium Cities Initiative (MCI) is a project of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Founded by Earth Institute director Professor Jeffrey Sachs in 2006, MCI aims to assist through research and policy analysis selected mid-sized cities across sub-Saharan Africa, located near Millennium Villages, to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The project's initial focus is on policy analysis impacting foreign direct investment (FDI), with a view to creating employment, stimulating domestic enterprise development and fostering economic growth. In addition to foreign investment, the MCI is working to promote an integrated City Development Strategy. The MCI draws upon, and strengthens, the MDGs work already underway by adding a focused urban-based component. MCI aims to demonstrate through its research and policy analysis that more FDI can be attracted to regional urban centers in Africa, with the resulting employment and economic growth effects. The Initiative will also produce urban development strategies issuing from the Initiative’s own MDG-based needs assessments that will inform municipal and national governments and their donors of the accurate, actual costs of achieving the MDGs.
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Nina Munk is a Canadian-American journalist and non-fiction author. She is the author or co-author of four books, including The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty and Fools Rush In: Jerry Levin, Steve Case, and the Unmaking of Time Warner. She is also the editor of the critical English translation of How It Happened: Documenting the Tragedy of Hungarian Jewry, an influential account of the Holocaust in Hungary written by Ernő Munkácsi in 1947. According to Publishers Marketplace, Munk is working on a new book for Alfred A. Knopf titled In My Dreams, We Are Together about "her family in Hungary during the Holocaust".
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Sauri is an eleven-village conglomerate located in the former Nyanza Province of western Kenya and was the first and largest of the fourteen Millennium Village Project (MVP) demonstration sites that ran from 2005 to 2015 in sub-Saharan Africa. The aim of the MVP in Sauri was to halve extreme poverty of villagers living below US$1 between 2000 and 2015. The overarching goal was achieving sustainable development through progress in public health, education, infrastructure, and agricultural productivity.
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