Millennium Villages Project
UN Millennium Development Goals

The Millennium Villages Project is a "bottom-up" approach to lifting developing country villages out of the poverty trap that afflicts more than a billion people worldwide. The Millennium Villages Project plans to provide early successes on how to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) - clear targets for reducing poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, environmental degradation and discrimination against women - by 2015.

Earth Institute scientists and development experts in agriculture, nutrition and health, economics, energy, water, environment and information technology are working with local communities and governments to apply a proven, integrated package of interventions to help villages get out of extreme poverty. As the Millennium Villages Project achieves successes, it will work with national governments and local organizations to scale up these poverty-reducing measures.

The Millennium Villages Project embraces the vision of the Millennium Declaration and the work of the U.N. Millennium Project, which are based on the overall paradigm that poor nations commit to good governance and development policies based in science and the scaling-up of best practices, and that rich countries commit to much greater financial assistance, access to markets, and expanded knowledge transfer to achieve the MDGs.

The UN Millennium Project and the Earth Institute at Columbia University are working with governments, donors, civil society and other partner organizations to support three types of Millennium Villages in hunger hotspots across the developing world. The aim of these initiatives is to (i) provide rigorous proof of concept for integrated, community-based, low-cost interventions to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in rural Africa, (ii) identify mechanisms for national-level scaling up of community-based interventions to support the design of national MDG-based development strategies, and (iii) engage governments and donors in a 10-year scaling-up effort across Africa and other hunger hotspots in Latin America and Asia.

The underlying principles of the Millennium Villages Project include:

• Community empowerment through participation and leadership in design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation
• Interventions based on proven, science-based research (biophysical and socioeconomic) combined with the best local knowledge
• Implementing within the budget estimates of the Millennium Project; at approximately $110 per person per year
• Building on existing community, government and non-government programs in the area
• Building capacity and empowerment at the local level
• Strengthening local institutions
• Linking with and obtaining support from local, provincial and national governments
• Consistency with national plans for interventions
• Beneficiaries pay part of the way - in cash or in-kind - congruent with their ability to pay or provide
• Planning to become self-sustaining or at a minimum self-governing - this would include an exit strategy in which government programs take over provision of specific public services
• Scale-up by spreading the advances from village to village, from district to district, and from country to country
• "Bottom-up" approaches can produce effective synergies with "top-down" ones, provided they are properly linked through enabling policies

The project will have immediate, short-term and long-term impacts on:

• The MDG villagers, involving several thousand people living in environmentally sustainable ways within 5 years
• Methods and manuals for implementing and scaling-up different activities in Millennium Villages
• Documentation of the village-level processes and costs for attaining the Millennium Development Goals, including governance, management, empowerment, and ownership
• National government policies and scaling-up plans for millions of Africans by 2015
• Training and equipping thousands of villagers, local-level extension agents, and government officials with the necessary knowledge and expertise to empower and train other villages for transfer and scaling-up in line with the Millennium Development Goals

( from http://www.earth.columbia.edu/mvp )

Positive Foundations at Brandeis University is aiming to be the first student-led university group to sponsor and partner with a Millennium Village. Please contribute to our efforts and get involved!

For more information on the Millennium Villages Project, please visit http://www.earth.columbia.edu/mvp and http://www.millenniumpromise.org.