Millennium Villages Project

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. No cleanup reason has been specified. Please help improve this article if you can. (March 2012) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

The Millennium Villages Project (MVP) was a demonstration project headed by the American economist Jeffrey Sachs under the auspices of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, the United Nations Development Programme, and Millennium Promise with the goal of achieving the U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals in rural Africa by 2015.^[1]

The project, described by the MVP as "a bold, innovative model for helping rural African communities lift themselves out of extreme poverty," was intended to prove the merits of a holistic, integrated, approach to rural development as outlined in Sachs' bestselling 2005 book The End of Poverty. As described by Bill Gates, whose foundation considered contributing money to the Millennium Villages Project: "[Sachs'] hypothesis was that these interventions would be so synergistic that they would start a virtuous upward cycle and lift the villages out of poverty for good."^[2]

The first Millennium village was launched in 2005 in Sauri, Kenya. "This is a village that’s going to make history," is how Sachs described Sauri in The Diary of Angelina Jolie and Dr. Jeffrey Sachs in Africa, a 2005 MTV documentary. "It’s a village that’s going to end extreme poverty."^[3]

After expanding to 10 sites across rural Africa, the Millennium Village Project ended with a disappointing final evaluation in 2015.^[4] While acknowledging in The Lancet that the MVP was not entirely successful ("the project achieved around a third of the MDG-related targets and fell short on two-thirds"), Sachs argued that the “the lessons learned from the MVP are highly pertinent."^[5] By contrast, critics have stated that "there is little scientific evidence that the project attained its goals," pronouncing it "a waste of hundreds of millions of dollars."^[6]

When asked if she considered the MVP a failure, journalist Nina Munk, who spent six years reporting on the MVP for her book The Idealist, said: "Well, no, I don't consider it to be a failure, because many people's lives, I believe, have been improved by the project itself.... In village after village I saw children who suffered from less malnutrition, for example; fewer incidence of malaria, quite clearly. There was higher agricultural production. There was improved hygiene in certain cases. But it also began to fall apart very quickly as the budgets ran low. In-fighting began. It was quite clear to me that it was neither sustainable and nor was it scalable."^[7]