I was surprised to see a recent report in The Economist suggesting thatthe Millennium Villages Project has failed in its efforts to scale up.As the advisor who served three presidents in Nigeria over the last sixyears in order to scale up the Millennium Villages to tens of millionsof people across the country, I'm surprised to have not received a callfrom the magazine to check the facts on what is actually a widelydiscussed and readily available case of nation-wide scale up.
Some background: for the six years that I humbly served as the specialassistant to the president on the Millennium Development Goals, I workedhand in hand with local government leaders to develop a project known asthe Conditional Grant Scheme for Local Government Areas (CGS-LGA). After2005, when Professor Jeffrey Sachs first alerted me to the important projecthe was launching in order to help Africa meet the Millennium DevelopmentGoals, our nation was delighted to take the concept into practice andlaunch two Millennium Village sites, then reaching about 45,000 people.
The government of Nigeria was inspired to go beyond just those sites andto scale up the MVP model to tens of millions more, by working through alocal government context. In partnership with Jeff and his team, we notonly achieved the robust design of an ambitious program in 113 localgovernments covering 20 million Nigerian poor but have also inspired ourparliament to invest more resources to reach all 774 local governmentsin our country by 2015. The project is Nigeria's, and, of course, buildson Nigeria's own organization, needs and strategies; the concepts andapproaches of the Millennium Village project are key inspirations andtechniques.
The funding for this scale up is our own. The government of Nigeria isusing the billion dollars per annum that it receives in debt relief totake this project to scale. We believe it is the right model to helpachieve the Millennium Development Goals for our poorest people. DespiteNigeria's incredible economic growth, too many mothers still die duringchildbirth, too few children make it to their fifth birthday, not enoughgirls are reaching secondary school and the real chance to break out ofthe poverty trap. We've seen the Millennium Village model work firsthand. The people of Nigeria deserve a real shot at ending poverty andthe MV model helps to design effective ways to do just this.
It's hard for those of us who work day in and day out, on the ground tofight poverty to see such flippancy and carelessness in the media. Thisis especially true in this case, where the facts are so easy toascertain.
The truth is simple. Just as Nigeria is scaling up the MillenniumVillages Project's ideas and tools to millions throughout the nation,more and more parts of Africa are working with the Millennium Villageteams to adopt the concepts of integrated rural development and thespecific tools and approaches of the project for application andadaptation in their own countries. The Government of Mali is workingwith the MVP team to scale up the concepts to 144 communes. Rwanda toorecently signed an MOU with the MVP to work on national-scale integratedrural development throughout the country.
Let's hope The Economist gets this story right and commits itself todoing a better job of telling the story about how Africans themselvesare leading the fight against poverty -- taking the best practices fromthe best projects and using their own funds to meet the MillenniumGoals. It's a story worth telling, after all.
Amina Az-Zubair, is CEO of Center for Development Policy Solutions and from 2005-2011 served as senior special assistant to the president of Nigeria on the Millennium Development Goals.