Millennium Villages Project

The Millennium Villages Project (MVP) is a high-profile joint initiative developed by a team of scientists at Columbia University’s Earth Institute and the nonprofit organization Millennium Promise. The MVP aims to meet the United Nations’ (UN) eight globally endorsed Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in sites across sub-Saharan Africa by helping villages in Africa to escape poverty within the 10-year period from 2005 to 2015.

The MVP uses an integrated package of scientifically proven aid interventions to tackle the myriad problems of poverty all at once, providing beneficiaries with tools and interventions that promote clean water, sanitation, and other essential infrastructure, education, food production, basic health care, and environmental sustainability. Villages are provided with relatively inexpensive technologies and approaches such as bed nets for malaria and cooking ...