Mayange, Rwanda
Mayange Cluster: 5 Millennium Villages | 25,000 residents

The Millennium Village cluster in Rwanda is located in Mayange, a sector of Bugesera District located about 40 km south of the capital, Kigali. In a country known as the “pays des milles collines” (“land of 1,000 hills”), the terrain around Mayange is flatter and drier than most of Rwanda. The area suffers from sporadic rainfall and declining soil fertility, leading to endemic poverty, illness, and a lack of economic opportunity. The project began working with an initial 5,000 people in Kagenge, one of Mayange's five subdivisions, or cells as they are referred to in Rwanda, in early 2006. The population was facing impending famine because of failing rains and a poor harvest the year before, and the health center was severely lacking in staff, medicines, equipment, and supplies, and had no electricity or running water.

Village Characteristics by Sector

Declining rainfall over the past five years has made productive agriculture challenging. Following a drought in September-December 2005, when the project arrived in January 2006 the team worked with UNICEF and the World Food Programme to facilitate the establishment of an emergency feeding center for severely malnourished mothers and children.

Primary schools are overcrowded, with classes as big as 80 children; the teachers lack books, supplies, and training. The costs associated with secondary education are such that most parents are unable to pay for their children to attend school past the primary level.

When the Millennium Village project began, Mayange Health Center was attempting to serve the local population despite having inadequate nursing staff and virtually no medicines or equipment, as well as no running water or electricity, even though power lines passed a few hundred meters away. Estimates of HIV and child mortality were not encouraging: HIV prevalence was estimated to be the highest in the nation at 13% (though the government has since revised those figures down into single digits). At the time nearly one in five children died before age 5. In February 2006 when the Millennium Villages Project began work at Mayange Health Center, the clinic with a catchment of roughly 25,000 people was seeing fewer than 750 patients a month. With simple, cost-effective interventions, Mayange Health Center – which had 6,146 total outpatient visitors in all of 2005 – consulted over 4,000 outpatients in just one month. All of this is helping to dramatically reduce under-5 mortality, ensuring healthy mothers are delivering healthy babies, and reversing the impact of limited access to care.

The lack of accessible drinking water forced villagers to spend hours each day retrieving what their family needed to survive. This time-consuming process diverts effort from other important activities, such as education and farming.

Intervention Highlights

By applying targeted, science-based interventions and maximizing community leadership and participation, the villagers of Mayange went from chronic hunger to a bumper harvest in 2006. Malaria incidence is significantly down, the health clinic is booming with patients who know they'll receive good care and treatment, and children now have electricity and a computer lab at school. In just a year and a half, Mayange is on the verge of transformation. The Government of Rwanda recently announced its plans to scale the Millennium Villages project to all 30 districts under its Vision 2020-Umurenge initiative, part of the national development strategy. Each district has designated its neediest sector for Millennium Village interventions, thereby taking the project to unprecedented scale.