The Millennium Villages
A New Approach to Fighting Poverty in Africa

Millennium Villages in the news

More than 1 billion people in the world live on less than $1 a day. In total, 2.7 billion people struggle to survive on less than $2 a day. Poverty in the developing world, however, goes far beyond income poverty. It means having to walk more than a mile everyday simply to collect water and firewood, and suffering from diseases that were eradicated from rich countries decades ago. Every year, eleven million children die—most under the age of 5, and more than 6 million die from completely preventable causes like malaria, diarrhea, and pneumonia.

In January 2005 the UN Millennium Project put forth an action plan to end this poverty through an integrated set of practical and utterly affordable interventions aimed at meeting the world's Millennium Development Goals: bed-nets to fight malaria; vaccinations to fight infectious disease; antiretroviral therapies to fight AIDS; fertilizers and agro-forestry to raise crop yields; bore wells for safe drinking water; diesel generators for village electricity, to name a few.

A model for fighting poverty in Africa

The 'Millennium Village' approach draws upon the village-level components of the UN Millennium Project's bold science-based action plan to fight poverty. It aims to identify the practical ways in which impoverished villages in Africa and elsewhere can adapt and implement the interventions. The Millennium Village approach recognizes the interdependence of the various Goals and stresses the need for simultaneous investments across agriculture, health, education, environment and infrastructure- all critical for success, and implemented in a time-bound manner with clear targets and goals. In this way, the Millennium Village research project, carried out jointly with the Earth Institute at Columbia University with financial support from the Government of Japan, offers a model for fighting poverty at the village level. The research project identifies and tests the practical ways in which the international community's political commitment to ending poverty can be translated into community-level action in Africa.

Two villages (in Sauri, Kenya and Koraro, Ethiopia) have already begun their Millennium Goal-focused programs and after only a few months of work, tremendous gains are already visible. In Sauri, Kenya, crop yields have quadrupled over the last seven months through the simple use of fertilizers, improved seeds and improved planting techniques. In Koraro, Ethiopia, for the first time, fruit trees are growing along side maize fields and enough bed-nets will be distributed to ensure that every child is protected from malarial mosquitoes at night.

Work in both Sauri and Koraro has shown that the people most in need are also the people who best know what it takes to win the fight against poverty. The underlying principle for each Millennium Village is that community empowerment, participation and leadership are key to designing and implementing the solutions that will end poverty even in the most remote places.

Practical solutions to end poverty

In its recommendations presented earlier this year, the UN Millennium Project found that the fight against extreme poverty has never been more winnable than it is today. Central among the Project's recommendations is the need for an African Green Revolution, an environmentally sustainable increase of food yields that will enable subsistence rural communities to achieve food security, and to begin diversifying production into commercial agriculture and into non-agricultural sectors.

At a cost of just $110 per person per year, each Millennium Village will include:

• Access to low-cost fertilizer, training on agroforestry and other natural methods to improve soil fertility, and drought- and/or insect-resistant seeds for crop planting;
• Investments to achieve gender equality in participation and management of village projects;
• Daily school lunch feeding programs to increase school attendance and completion, and together with nutritional supplementation programs, to assure nutritional quality and sustainability;
• New health clinic in the village, access to essential medicines, provision of anti-malarial long-lasting insecticide treated bed nets, a village doctor, and nurses;
• Solar-powered lighting systems for homes, electricity, and cleaner cook stoves;
• Use of simple tools such as foot pumps to more effectively gain access to water, and water filtration and purification systems;
• Innovative information technologies;
• Supporting the creation of committees in charge of various activities empowering communities to decide what is needed as a group and ensure active community ownership and partnership in all project activities.

Backing up results with tried and tested science

Crucially, the Millennium Village research project is anchored in a rigorous scientific assessment of progress, cost and efficacy of interventions. The research project will generate a unique scientific understanding of the costs and benefits of integrated, strategic investments in agriculture, health, infrastructure, education, environmental management, and other areas. To obtain a scientific understanding of how interventions and the required resources need to vary across Africa, the UN Millennium Project's research initiative will support at least one village in each major agro-ecological rural zone of the continent.

In partnership with local government structures, the Millennium Villages model—a package of critical, life-saving, and practical interventions in order to address multiple, inter-related conditions of extreme poverty—enables whole communities to fight against poverty that kills.