The Millennium Village Project (MVP) was launched in 2005-6 in order to accelerate progress towards the Millennium Development Goals in the poorest regions of rural Africa. A dozen clusters of villages around Africa have adopted bold and novel strategies to overcome poverty, hunger, and disease. Halfway through the ten-year project, the results are very exciting: agriculture production is up significantly, free basic health care is in place, malaria is coming under control, many more children are in school, and farmers are organizing cooperatives to diversify their crops and raise incomes.
The core idea of the project is that poor rural communities can take on several initiatives simultaneously in a strategy that is sometimes called "integrated development." In the case of the Millennium Villages, five areas of community life are prioritized: agriculture, health, education, infrastructure, and business development. By investing simultaneously across these sectors, the communities make progress towards the Millennium Development Goals and the escape from poverty.
Development leaders in Africa take the lead, with the partnership of many organizations and businesses. Scientists in Africa partner with scientists at Columbia University and elsewhere to design new approaches to long-standing problems: how to control malaria, how to improve soil nutrients, how to bring information technology into the schools and clinics, how to mobilize community health workers effectively.
In medical school, the young doctors have the slogan, "See one, do one, teach one." The idea is learning by doing. Students watch a medical procedure; then they are asked to do the procedure, under the preceptor's supervision; finally they are asked to teach the procedure to the next crop of students. The learning proceeds very quickly. That is how a generation of clinicians obtain their training.
The Millennium Villages work in a similar way. The villages serve as a kind of model for the neighborhood and the country. The villages take proven interventions from past experience -- for example using bed nets to fight malaria -- and implement the intervention. They establish a system for implementation, do it, and then teach it to their neighbors. The successes serve as a leading edge for national programs to achieve the Millennium Development Goals.
The project has its share of critics and skeptics. This is natural. We in the project are making a strong claim: that development aid and partnerships can break the cycle of hunger, disease, and poverty if properly deployed. The experience in the Millennium Villages will help to answer the feasibility of rapid progress against long-standing scourges.
The skeptics argue many points. They say that progress is not fast enough. They say that progress is not special to the Millennium Villages but is occurring in the neighboring villages. They say that the progress is occurring but is too expensive to replicate and take to scale. We believe that all of these arguments are being disproved, yet we are the first to say that "time will tell."
Half way through the 10-year project, we have found that certain important things can be accomplished very quickly. Malaria deaths and disease can be reduced within a year or two. Access to other basic health interventions for mothers and children can be improved. Agriculture production can increase significantly. Hunger can be reduced, especially the kind of chronic hunger (resulting in "stunting" of growth) that can lead to a lifetime of disabilities.
Other things take more time. Poverty comes down less quickly than food production goes up. Even when farmers double or triple their production of grains, they may remain below the poverty line. The bigger gains in income require more crop diversification and local business development, a process that can require several years and more organization by farmers.
Our tendency in the Millennium Villages is to move with all responsible haste. There is no time to lose. If something is working, we work quickly alongside many partners to help the host country to scale it up. For example, when a massive distribution of bed nets in 2005-6 brought malaria down rapidly, we and other partners urged the host countries to take these measures to national scale, and many have done so.
Many critics are complaining, "Not so fast." They want years of more testing. However, the kinds of interventions being implemented in the Millennium Villages are generally well proven but underutilized. The Project's contribution alongside government partners is to show how to introduce these interventions in a systematic way, for example, how to distribute bed nets in a manner that leads to their high rate of utilization. (One key, we found, is the deployment of community health workers).
In a recent article in the Economist, several wrong claims were made about the project based on an unpublished paper. One claim is that the project is not working since the progress in the Millennium Villages is also occurring in the neighboring villages, albeit at a slower rate. This is a mistaken criticism. The project itself has been encouraging the take-up of a range of interventions (bed nets, fertilizer, high-yield seeds, new diagnostic methods, and so forth) in neighboring villages and at the national scale. In fact, the Millennium Village Project in Kenya directly supported the procurement and distribution of 160 tons of fertilizer and 22 tons of seeds to two of the neighboring "comparison" villages included in this paper. Rather than undercutting the point of the project, progress nearby the Millennium Village sites often helps to prove the point.
Another claim, even more outlandish, is that agriculture production is going up sharply but poverty is remaining entrenched. That is not our finding. We are finding that poverty is coming down, albeit less rapidly than grain production has risen. It is taking time for farm households to diversify their incomes, achieve creditworthiness, and establish cooperatives that can help to finance, produce, and market a wider range of high-value products.
Inevitably our public statements are ahead of the scientific publications coming out of the project. That is the result of the policy intention to speed scaling up of the types of interventions demonstrating success in the project. We are working with the host-country governments in real time to scale up the promising interventions, and we also proceed with the scientific process, with its very careful measurement, peer-review and rigorous approach to documentation and publication. Critics are keeping the project on its toes, and we are appreciative of that; it is important that we present detailed evidence that measures the progress in the villages.
Please stay tuned. Watch the results and the debates. Most importantly, join the process with new ideas, technologies, and approaches. This is a learning process, not a rigid blueprint. Literally dozens of organizations are contributing to the progress we are seeing.
We believe that a new, more coherent, more organized, and more accountable process of local development is taking shape, not only in the Millennium Villages Project, but in many other integrated rural-development projects like it. The revolutions in information and communications technologies in particular are permitting advances in every area of life -- health, education, agriculture, business, infrastructure -- to enable breakthroughs unimaginable even a few years earlier. We are optimistic and pleased that major advances are now underway, yet time, evidence, and the extent of poverty reduction will provide the ultimate verdict.
Follow Jeffrey Sachs on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JeffDSachs
http://nitroethiopians.org/TPLF_Businesses.html
http://articles2u.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/corruption-and-tplf
http://www.anuakjustice.org/genocide.htm
How many Ethiopians should be killed so that Prof Sachs and supporters of the "friendly tyrant" in Ethiopia understand that Ethiopians languish under woyane state terrorism. Is it not possible to bring development without looting and killing Professor Sachs.
I suppose that grasping and gasping describes it well. When I click 'Poverty Statistics', for instance the following menu appears:
MBA degree College
Distance courses
Nursing courses
CPD courses
---
Nothing whatsoever even remotely related to poverty. The link you provided is utterly worthless as a reference to anything except cheap advertising. The fact that you've evinced the unmitigated cheek to waste my time with this trash does indeed make me gasp. I can only assume that you're playing a bad joke.
' If you don't see how the total mouths to feed on earth has anything to do with global poverty, I commend on the purity and innocence of your thought.'
I don't see it at the website you referenced in any case. But I do see adverts for 'Weight loss Camps' and 'Quick Weight loss Diet'.
'Oh, do you trade for sanitation services like the Chinese used to do, by bringing your "night soil" to their farms?'
What in heaven's name are you talking about?
I most certainly do. However, http://www.worldometers.info/, which is probably what you really meant to cite as your reference, is actually quite interesting. I just wish you'd check your references to make sure they're correct instead of sending your readership on wild goose chases. If you'd spend more time doing that and less publishing lame insults everyone would be much better off.
Has it occurred to anyone else that perhaps it isn't the Africans who need non-African missionaries, but the Europeans, Americans, and Chinese who need African missionaries to come preach their gospel to those benighted climes? 'What gospel?', I hear you shriek. Well, you know, the good news of la dolce vita, that Alfred-E.-Newman-esque ethos epitomised by the sage query 'What me worry?', internalisation of the idea that, if you eat right and stay fit, you'll die anyway---so what the hey?
Don't care if you don't like it, libertarians. You are living in a dream world of pure rhetoric. Every other 1st world nation on earth has national health insurance. And they love it. Any politician who so much as chats about weakening it gets destroyed at the polls. They like having their money "taken by force" for "free" health care. As opposed to diing. Silly them.
Taking money from others without their consent as codified in law for whatever reason is theft. There is no permission in the U.S. ConstitutiÂon for U.S. federal officials to take money from others without their consent for the Medicare program, for instance. Therefore U.S. federal officials are committing theft whenever they do so. Theft is wrong.
'Every other 1st world nation on earth has national health insurance. And they love it.'
Unless perhaps they're British and elderly:
'Elderly being failed by those in NHS who are supposed to care for them
Published on Thursday 17 February 2011 01:00
'A scathing report says the NHS has failed the elderly. Sheena Hastings talks to a leading health educator about what can be done.
'“DISMISSIVE attitude...apparent indifference...to deplorable standards of care...dehydration and poor nutrition....inadequate pain relief...poor communication... an ignominious failure to look beyond a patient’s clinical condition and respond to the social and emotional needs of the individual...”'
-- http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/features/elderly_being_failed_by_those_in_nhs_who_are_supposed_to_care_for_them_1_3082336
It is completely reasonable – vital, even – to ask hard questions about the degree to which people benefit and whether benefits will last beyond the initial five years of giveaways. These people are subjects of an experiment, whether they know it or not. They – along with donors and governments - deserve proof that this works to improve their lives in a lasting way.
Sachs’ thesis is that giving people all these services and inputs will get them out of poverty for good. That is his opinion, and it is the opinion of other reasonable, experienced people that big giveaways don’t work and cannot be provided long term and at big scale. The Millenium Villages idea seems like old (read discredited) wine in a new bottle, but that is just my opinion.
The only way to sort out all these opinions is through well-thought-out experiments, and this is where MV missed a huge opportunity. Jeffrey Sachs was so certain of his opinion that he raised $150 million, launched a bunch of projects and failed to set up meaningful comparisons. Now we’re reduced to shouting opinions at each other because we don’t and won’t have good data from which to make solid conclusions.
These villagers deserve better.
I would like him, or someone else equally qualified to explain, how, in the abscence of convenient, inexpensive, comfortable, accessible birth control all of this great advanced thinking doesn't just lead to further starvation, and environmental degradation.
See: worldometer.org.
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Not a good thing. Have you calculated all input costs taking into account all time and effort from all contributory organisations? An outline of project costs would be useful.
The proliferation of development organisations may lead to networking that absorbs a proportion of spend, creates and develops career paths for development workers but contributes only marginally to development. Your defensive tone reminds me of others I have heard justifying the overweening structures supporting development projects.
Everyone in the development industry thinks its a wonderful idea. More money for Universities, more money for Academics, more money for all levels of Bureaucrats, and especially more money for Agri-Business.
Google: "Indian famers suicide Monsanto"
The most important site that proves your point: worldometers.org.
Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding---the alarm bells are going off. Whenever I read about anything is 'free' it's a pretty sure indication that perpetual-motion-machine thinking is in play. Let me repeat it once again: nothing is free---ever, anywhere, under any circumstances. Someone, somewhere, somehow has to pay for every single little good or service ever produced or that ever will be produced. In short, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
Speaking of which, who's paying for all of this? Is the program being funded by 100% voluntarily donated money, or is it (as I rather suspect) being funded with money stolen by one or more government agencies. If the former, then I wish the Millennium Village Project folks the best of luck. If the later, then I would kindly ask the same folks to please stop stealing. The ends don't justify the means.
It is with great sadness that I read your depressing comment. I am joyed by the thought, though, that your letter and my response to it are free.
That's false. It costs your children huge amounts of effort to develop. It costs you and/or the society in which you and they live tremendous amounts of time, effort, and money to provide an environment in which they can do so.
'... enjoying the new day's beginning and end is free ...'
That's false. It's cost your parents and their society plenty to see that you lived to grow up to enjoy the new day's beginning and end.
'... as is the ability to worship your "god" free.'
That's false. How many millions of our countrymen and women have had to die in wars to give us the ability to worship as we please?
You take too much for granted in my humble opinion. I dare to repeat it: nothing's for free. Everything has a cost.
Challenge taken:
Joel E. Cohen, a Mathematical biologist and the head of the Laboratory of Population at Rockefeller University and Columbia University. “How Many People Can the Earth Support?”
“Providing modern family planning methods to all people with unmet needs would cost about $6.7 billion a year, slightly less than the $6.9 billion that Americans are expected to spend for Halloween this year”.
The New York Times, Op-Ed October 24, 2011.
Aslo see worldometers.org.
Unless you are Rick Perry, or an honest Catholic priest, tell me how vaccinations, irrigation, fertilizer, school, medicine, and love, plenty of love, do not lead to a population explosion.
Now explain to me what the 'magic methodology' is.
Next, since this works so great, why are we not spreading this very methodology widely among our own poverty-striken areas?
In terms of methodology, all I see is:
1. Identify and attack the major problems simultaneously
"..take on several initiatives simultaneously in a strategy that is sometimes called "integrated development."
2. Actively show/teach the citizens what to do.
"... "See one, do one, teach one." The Millennium Villages work in a similar way. The villages serve as a kind of model for the neighborhood and the country. The villages take proven interventions from past experience -- for example using bed nets to fight malaria -- and implement the intervention. They establish a system for implementation, do it, and then teach it to their neighbors."
Unless I am missing something, the real 'breakthrough' that I see is threefold:
1. Someone is providing a spark of hope for people who, heretofore, had little of it.
2. The idea of working together to solve common problems is inculcated by an encouraging leadership.
3. Someone is bothering to do (1) and (2).
Am I missing something?