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Fast Facts on the Millennium Villages

The Millennium Villages aim to establish the ground-level evidence showing that the UN Millennium Project’s recommended interventions for rural Africa can lift villages out of the poverty trap and achieve economic viability through community empowerment backed up with adequate resources.

The project is a cooperative effort of several groups, including The Earth Institute at Columbia University, Millennium Promise, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the World Agroforestry Center (ICRAF), various partner NGOs, national and local African governments, and rural African communities.

The first Millennium Village was launched in Sauri, Kenya in July 2004 and has already seen remarkable results. For example, villagers have gone from chronic hunger to a 406 ton surplus of maize in just one year. Also, for the first time in years, they are able to sell their produce in nearby markets.

There are currently 79 Millennium Villages located in the following 10 countries in sub- Saharan Africa: Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, and Uganda.

Each Millennium Village has approximately 5,000 people and the project is working with nearly 400,000 people throughout rural Africa.

Millennium Villages sites are chosen based on three criteria: location in a hunger hot spot in Africa (defined by at least 20% of the under-five child population underweight), location in a relatively well-governed country, and location in one of 12 distinct agroecological zones in Africa.

Millennium Villages are facilitated for a period of at least 5 years, during which time leadership of interventions is transitioned to the community committees and local government.

Some of these investments for interventions include: seed and fertilizer, bednets to fight malaria, school lunch feeding programs, antiretrovirals to fight AIDS, and improved safe water drinking points.

The distribution of free, insecticide-treated bednets in the Villages has lead to a decline in malaria incidence by threefold.

The project’s support of a school feeding program has dramatically increased school attendance and allowed over three times the number of students to be fed at school than before.