At the UN Millennium Summit in September 2000, world leaders adopted the Millennium Declaration, committing nations to a new global partnership to reduce extreme poverty and address pressing challenges of hunger, gender inequality, illiteracy, and disease. The year 2015 has been affirmed as the deadline for reaching these Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets.

The Millennium Villages Project was piloted in Kenya and Ethiopia in 2005 and then launched at scale in 2006 to reach nearly half a million people across ten countries. The goal is to show how an integrated approach to community-level development can translate the international MDG agreements into ground-level breakthroughs throughout rural sub-Saharan Africa. Villages are located in deeply impoverished rural areas that were considered “hunger hotspots” - with at least 20% of children malnourished. Sites were selected to reflect a diversity of agro-ecological zones, representing a range of challenges to income, food production, disease ecology, infrastructure, and health system development. The projects are locally led by host communities and governments, which receive support from the Earth Institute at Columbia University, Millennium Promise, and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), in addition to an array of other key partners.

The Millennium Villages Project is a ten-year initiative spanning two five-year phases. The first phase focuses on achieving quick wins, especially in staple crop production and disease control, and on establishing basic systems for integrated rural development that help communities escape the poverty trap and achieve the MDGs. The Project involves the coordinated community-led delivery of a locally tailored package of scientifically proven interventions for agriculture, education, health, and infrastructure. Over the first five-year phase, interventions are delivered at a modest cost, totaling approximately $120 per capita per year, of which MVP brings about half to complement funds from the host government, the local community, and other partners. The second five-year phase will focus more intensively on commercializing the gains in agriculture and continuing to improve local service delivery systems in a manner that best supports local scale-up.

Progress to Date

The Millennium Villages are underpinned by a robust monitoring and evaluation platform. Detailed socio-economic and health surveys, including biological and anthropometric measurements, and biophysical data on crop yields, take place at Project initiation and are repeated after three and five years of program exposure. An economic costing study measures the contributions of Project partners to all clusterlevel activities. Finally, qualitative process evaluation systematically documents the experience of implementers, Project partners, and beneficiaries. This report highlights the early results after three years of implementation across five initial Millennium Village sites in Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda. Progress toward achieving the MDGs are derived from recently completed mid-term (year three) surveys. All data contained in this report compare baseline values to year-three assessments, among a sample of several hundred households across each cluster. A summary of these findings is presented in this report. A more detailed description of the overall evaluation methodology is provided in the Appendix.

Further scientific results, including comparisons with other villages, will be published later this year, including in peer-reviewed scientific literature. We therefore emphasize the provisional nature of the results presented here, both in the sense that they are after only the third year of a ten-year project, and in that they represent only part of the third-year evaluation underway this year. We are presenting these partial results now in order to foster a better public understanding of the Project and its potential to help reduce extreme poverty, hunger, and disease in rural Africa. We hope that this report contributes to the public discussion in the lead-up to the MDG Summit in September 2010.