Africa

Millennium Village in Gumulira,
Malawi
© UNDP

what are the millennium villages?

The Millennium Villages project offers a bold, innovative model for helping rural African communities lift themselves out of extreme poverty. The Millennium Villages are proving that by fighting poverty at the village level. Through community-led development, rural Africa can achieve the Millennium Development Goals - global targets for reducing extreme poverty and hunger by half - and improving education, health, gender equality and environmental sustainability by 2015.

Thus, the villages can escape the extreme poverty that traps hundreds of millions of people throughout the continent.

With the help of new advances in science and technology, project personnel work with villages to create and facilitate sustainable, community-led action plans that are tailored to the villages' specific needs and designed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals.

Simple solutions like providing high-yield seeds, fertilizers, medicines, drinking wells, and materials to build school rooms and clinics are effectively combating extreme poverty and nourishing communities into a new age of health and opportunity. Improved science and technology including agroforestry; insecticide-treated bed nets; antiretroviral drugs; the Internet; remote sensing; and geographic information systems enrich this progress. Over a 5-year period, community committees and local governments build capacity to continue these initiatives and develop a solid foundation for sustainable growth.

The Millennium Villages project in Ghana, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, and Uganda is executed by UNDP Country Offices. Throughout the continent, more than 400,000 people are leading this bold initiative, giving their time, skills, and resources to make the project a success and one that is relevant to local conditions. Because Millennium Villages are an investment toward a sustainable end to extreme poverty, Millennium Village communities strengthen their local governments and institutions and certify the preparation and implementation of the interventions in their community. This is necessary to ensure that their development can become sustainable and self-sufficient.

The Millennium Village project is based on the findings of the UN Millennium Project and is a partnership between The Earth Institute at New York's Columbia University, Millennium Promise and the United Nations Development Programme.

expansion and scaling-up

The Millennium Villages concept is currently being expanded to Liberia (with funds from Norway), Madagascar (with funds from Korea) and Benin, Cameroon and Mozambique (with funds from Japan). In parallel, with existing villages showing considerable results, several countries have developed bold plans to scale up the successful interventions to the national level. The MDG scale-up phase will take off shortly, notably in Mali and Nigeria. The government of Senegal has also expressed interest in scaling up the experience.

Mali’s scale-up plan shows special promise thanks to President Amadou Toumani Touré’s willingness to implement Millennium Village-inspired interventions in 166 of the country’s 703 communes, and because there is already a strong, decentralized system of governance with extensive community participation on the ground. The target communes have been chosen for their lack of infrastructure to achieve the MDGs (health centers, schools, electricity, water, etc.) and because they are the most vulnerable to food crises. Recognizing Mali's scale-up potential, a broad range of international actors have come together to seize this exciting opportunity to lift two million of the world’s poorest people out of extreme poverty by 2015.