A Solution to Extreme Poverty: The Millennium Villages
Millennium Villages are a “proof of concept” for fighting poverty at the village level and are designed to
demonstrate how the Millennium Development Goals can be met in rural Africa through community-led
development. The Millennium Village initiative works directly with the respective communities, nongovernmental
organizations and national governments to show how rural African communities can lift
themselves out of poverty and achieve the Goals if they have access to proven and powerful technologies
that can enhance their farm productivity, health, education, and access to markets – while operating within
the budget constraints established by international agreements for official development assistance.
Millennium Villages are currently situated in 12 sites located in 10 African countries (Ethiopia, Ghana,
Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, and Uganda), comprising 79 villages of 5,000
people each, thus and reaching almost 400,000 people. Each of the 12 clusters of villages is located in a
distinct agroecological zone—arid or humid, highland or lowland, grain producing or pastoral—to reflect the
range of farming, water, and disease challenges facing the continent and to show how tailored strategies
can overcome each one of them.
The Millennium Village effort is explicitly linked to achieving the Millennium Development Goals and
addresses an integrated and scaled-up set of interventions based on the recommendations of the UN
Millennium Project. The interventions cover food production, nutrition, education, health services, roads,
energy, communications, water, sanitation, enterprise diversification and environmental management. The
initiative focuses on participatory community decision-making uses improved science-based technologies
and techniques that have only recently become available, such as agroforestry, insecticide-treated malaria
bed nets, antiretroviral drugs, the Internet, remote sensing, and geographic information systems.
The process of funding and implementing a Millennium Village is a shared effort between the Millennium
Villages initiative, other donors, local and national governments, NGOs and the village community. Each
Millennium Village requires a donor investment of $300,000 per year for five years. This includes a cost of
$250,000 per village per year (5,000 villagers per village multiplied by $50 per villager) and an additional
$50,000 per village per year to cover logistical and operational costs associated with implementation,
community training, and monitoring and evaluation. The other $60 per villager per year will come from
village members, local and national governments and partner organizations, making for total funding of
$110 per person per year.
Millennium Villages offer a scalable model for fighting poverty that can be expanded from the village to
district level and eventually to additional countries across Africa.
Ensuring that the Millennium Villages can be scaled up as part of national development strategies and
agreeing on cost-sharing from the outset ensures that governments are full partners in the project and as
well as long-term operational sustainability.
By raising productivity, diversifying into higher value crops, and promoting off-farm employment, incomes will
rise in the villages. Higher incomes will also raise household savings thus accelerating economic
diversification and household investments in human capital. The resulting economic growth in the villages
will reduce income- and non-income poverty, and enable the communities to finance a growing share of
investments to achieve the Millennium Development Goals.
A central proposition underpinning the Millennium Villages concept therefore is that operational sustainability
can be achieved in each village before the 2015 MDG deadline, although many villages will still require
ongoing but generally declining financial support beyond then. For these villages, it will be crucial that
existing ODA commitments for 2010 and 2015 are met and maintained until the respective developing
countries graduate from the need for external support.
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UNDP Malawi
