How
Millennium Villages Work
The Millennium
Village approach is to have a team in Africa (mostly African's
themselves) work with African villages to create and implement
practical, community-led development plans. These action plans
take into account the village's particular needs to target the
root causes of extreme poverty designed to achieve the Millennium
Development Goals in five years and to build a sustainable future
for the village.
Each village
project offers donor support over a five-year period as the villagers
implement the interventions that lift them out of extreme poverty
and create a solid foundation for future sustainable development.
Unlike development
projects of past decades or other village-specific projects, Millennium
Villages offer a unique approach to development in some key ways:
- Millennium
Villages explicitly link interventions to the Millennium Development
Goals and directly address all eight goals in each village.
- Millennium
Villages focus on participatory, community-led decision-making
and implementation. Each village develops specific groups and
community members to participate in identifying and evaluating
the challenges of extreme poverty with support from a scientific
team and local partners. As a group they develop a village-specific
action plan that incorporates the implementation and monitoring
of the various MDG interventions that are most appropriate.
- Millennium
Villages place an emphasis on recent advances in science and
technology to effectively address Africa's unique challenges
of geography and ecology. These include advances in agroforestry
that help improve soils, the use of insecticide-treated bed
nets to prevent malaria, antiretroviral drugs to combat HIV/AIDS,
and wireless technology to provide access to mobile phones and
the Internet.
- Millennium
Villages are working with the national and local governments
where the villages are located to assist in expanding the success
of the villages regionally and nationally. The scaling-up of
the Millennium Villages is possible because the interventions
are fully funded within the 0.7% (of rich nations' Gross National
Prodcuts) framework established by the international community.
Success for Millennium Villages can translate into broad success
in achieving the Millennium Development Goals.
