The Millennium Villages project offers a bold, innovative model for helping rural African communities lift themselves out of extreme poverty. The Millennium Villages themselves are proving that by fighting poverty at the village level through community-led development, rural Africa can achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015 and escape from the poverty trap. By applying this scalable model to give them a hand up, not a hand out, people of this generation can get on the ladder of development and start climbing on their own.
With the help of new advances in science and technology, project personnel work with villages to create and facilitate sustainable, community-led action plans that are tailored to the villages’ specific needs and designed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. Simple solutions like providing high-yield seeds, fertilizers, medicines, drinking wells, and materials to build school rooms and clinics are effectively combating extreme poverty and nourishing communities into a new age of health and opportunity. Improved science and technology such as agroforestry, insecticide-treated malaria bed nets, antiretroviral drugs, the Internet, remote sensing, and geographic information systems enriches this progress.
Over a 5-year period, community committees and local governments build capacity to continue these initiatives and develop a solid foundation for sustainable growth.To date, the Millennium Villages project has reached nearly 400,000 people in 79 villages. Clustered into12 groups across 10 African countries (Ethiopia,Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda,Senegal, Tanzania, and Uganda), the villages are located in different agro-ecological zones that reflect the range of farming, water, and disease challenges facing the continent. Success in these different zones shows how tailored strategies can overcome each challenge.
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