Millennium Villages Project

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The Earth Institute’s 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.

Positive Foundations at Brandeis University is scheduled to become the first single university student group to both sponsor and partner with a Millennium Village. Positive Foundations, the premier student organization mobilizing around the Millennium Development Goals in the United States, is led by Executive Directors Sam Vaghar '08 and Seth Werfel '10. These students were selected in November 2006 as youth world leaders to speak at the United Nations for a conference on the MDGs and the Millennium Villages Project. This summer, Positive Foundations will launch the first National University Network on the MDGs, which will bring together universities across the country in an effort to eradicate extreme poverty. The group at Brandeis University has more than 500 students involved as well as support from the faculty and administration of the university.

The UNC-Duke-Bennett Millennium Village Project (www.ncmvp.org) aims to raise $1.5 million by June 2007 to sponsor a Millennium Village in Kenya.