International Commitments

Perhaps the core challenge to achieving the MDGs in Africa lies in channeling the admirable ambitions of international agreements into practical breakthroughs on the ground. In 2005, two major and interconnected international agreements reinforced this challenge. First, the July 2005 G8 Gleneagles Summit committed to double official development assistance (ODA) flows to Africa from $25 billion in 2004 to $50 billion in 2010, en route to larger increases by 2015. In per capita terms, the G8 promise translates to roughly $80 of annual ODA by 2010. Second, at the September 2005 UN World Summit, all countries committed to implementing national development strategies ambitious enough to achieve the MDGs.

Eight years before the 2015 MDG deadline, there is an urgent need to translate words into ground-leve' results—to ensure we know “what success looks like” in rural Africa and to prompt a broader momentum that helps break the current state of global policy inaction.

Role of the Millennium Villages

To this end, Millennium Villages have been launched in an effort to establish “proof of concept” for broad-based, community-led development strategies to achieve the MDGs in rural Africa. Drawn from the UN Millennium Project's recommendations, the Millennium Villages take the G8's ODA promises for 2010 at face value to demonstrate how the commitments could be used to support ground-level investment strategies. The Millennium Villages project provides $50 worth of support per person per year–much more than today's typical support levels in rural Africa but well within the G8's $80 promise– to provide investments in four key sectors: agriculture, health, education and infrastructure. Village-level support pays for simple interventions like fertilizer and improved seeds to boost crop yields, long-lasting insecticide-treated nets to fight malaria, and locally produced school meals to support educational outcomes. The affordability of Millennium Villages within the boundaries of existing ODA promises underpins the feasibility of the model's expansion throughout Africa.

Sustainability

The financing model for the project is built on the premise that, with modest support, Millennium Village economies can transition over a period from subsistence farming to self-sustaining commercial activity. Over time, household incomes will rise due to increased productivity, diversification into higher value crops and expanded off-farm employment. Higher incomes will raise household savings, accelerating economic diversification and household investments in human capital. As economic growth accelerates, the villages will assume the cost of many interventions that the Millennium Villages initiative is financing. 

Economic success will therefore come through agricultural transformation and commercialization; completion of “big-ticket” infrastructure investments (e.g. expansion of the road and power grid); and scaling up of national and local social services, especially in health and education. In addition to the boost in agricultural productivity and the adoption of commercial agriculture, sustainability will be achieved by the following:

• The national and local governments will upgrade their own community-level services by 2011as part of the national MDG strategies, backed by increased official development assistance
• Official donors will make up part or all of the financing gap in at least some of the sites, for example when Millennium Village clusters become part of broader donor-backed programs
• Millennium Villages will work with local and international NGOs to encourage the continuation of the NGOs' $20 per capita per year contributions to the MVs after 2011 (as needed)
• The project will aim to continue its own presence as advisors after 2011, though at a much lower or even zero-scale of financial resource flows

Roadmap for Scaling-up and Expansion

There are five key dimensions on which scalability of the Millennium Villages project can be envisioned:

• The straightforward expansion of Millennium Villages to new countries , such as Madagascar and Mozambique, both of which have announced their intent to launch a Millennium Village program.
• The expansion of specific village-level interventions , such as fertilizer support or mass distribution of anti-malaria nets, to country-wide scale-up programs. Millennium Village clusters currently reach up to 55,000 people at a time, and can therefore inform the national scale adoption of practical interventions. This has already been the case with the agricultural support programs in Malawi.
• The launch of new Millennium Village clusters across different regions of countries where Millennium Villages are already underway. The Governments of Mali, Rwanda and Uganda are each in the process of preparing such strategies in the context of their respective national administrative structures
• A fourth dimension is the expansion of coverage of existing activities from clusters up to the district level. The Government of Kenya, for example, is currently crafting plans for 98 new “Millennium Districts,” with a total population of nearly 4 million people.
• The expansion of strategic partnerships across existing programs, integrating MDG complementary activities to initiatives already underway. For example, existing community-based programs focusing on agricultural interventions could be complemented with an integrated suite of interventions focusing on health, education, infrastructure and so forth.

The early successes already point the way to several quick impact initiatives, or “quick wins”–in agriculture, disease control, school feeding programs and the provision of safe drinking water. The evidence suggests the readiness of local communities to contribute major efforts to the MDGs. The evidence also suggests the ability to manage a multi-dimensional investment program in agriculture, health, education, and infrastructure, at the community level in rural areas. All of these successes are leading many governments such as Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda to envision national rural development strategies based explicitly on scaling up the approaches of the Millennium Villages project. An increasing group of official and private donors are stepping forward to support such a scale up.

National transformation

Millennium Villages cannot constitute an entire national development program. They focus on development in rural communities and rural districts. In addition to Millennium Villages, countries need MDG-based strategies for national-scale infrastructure (highways, power grids, national ports, national airports, etc.), urban-based development (special export zones, urban services) and tourist development outside of rural districts. A proper development strategy, therefore, will incorporate the Millennium Village model into a holistic approach, balancing rural, urban, and national strategies.