What are Millennium Promise's objectives?

What does Millennium Promise do?

What is the relationship between Millennium Promise and the Millennium Villages project?

What role does Millennium Promise play in advancing the Millennium Development Goals?

With whom does Millennium Promise partner?

How is Millennium Promise funded and how are resources allocated?

Is Millennium Promise a tax-exempt organization?

How can I become involved with Millennium Promise?

Where can I learn more about Millennium Promise?

What are the Millennium Villages and where are they located?

What are some examples of solutions introduced within the Millennium Villages?

What makes Millennium Villages unique? Hasn't this already been done?

Will this effort be scaled up for greater impact?

Are the Millennium Villages sustainable?

Who are the key actors involved in the Millennium Villages?

How are national and local governments involved?

How much money does it take to fund a Millennium Village?

Isn't corruption a concern within some of the countries in which you are working?

How do you manage villages in countries experiencing social unrest and turmoil?

Why should I be concerned about extreme poverty?

I'm concerned about poverty in Africa, but is this really the best way to help?

How can I donate to Millennium Promise?

How much of my donation is spent on administrative costs?

How can I view my donation history or edit my credit card information?

Can you send me your annual report or financial statements?

Is my donation tax-deductible outside of the United States?

Is Millennium Promise rated by any outside charity groups?

I would like to raise money for Millennium Promise. Do you have any information you can provide to me?

If I have an event to raise money for Millennium Promise, can you help me get celebrities connected with your organization to come to my event?

I'd like to partner with Millennium Promise by making t-shirts, necklaces, bracelets, etc. and donating the proceeds to Millennium Promise. What support services can Millennium Promise provide to me?

I would like to support a village in Africa. What steps do I need to take?

Can I volunteer or intern with Millennium Promise?

Can I visit a Millennium Village?

Millennium Promise is dedicated to eliminating extreme poverty in our lifetime by first achieving the Millennium Development Goals by 2015. Together with our global network of partners, we are showing how the Goals are accessible and achievable, building momentum for success through advocacy, innovation and a practical, holistic approach to building sustainable communities.

Click here to learn more about the Millennium Development Goals.

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Millennium Promise supports the achievement of the world's goals to end extreme poverty – the Millennium Development Goals – and by extension advocates for the 1.4 billion people in the world who live on less than $1 per day. Our work unites science, business, civil society and government in these efforts by empowering communities and partners alike to become a part of the solution to ending extreme poverty.

We believe that ending extreme poverty requires practical and affordable solutions that simultaneously address interconnected challenges in health and nutrition, agriculture and environment, gender equality, business development, education, and infrastructure. We are demonstrating that success is possible through innovative, holistic programs such as the Millennium Villages project and School-2-School program, and by building a dynamic alliance that empowers everyone to be part of the solution. Together, we can fulfill our generation's promise to end extreme poverty.

Click here to learn more about our work.

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The Millennium Villages project is the flagship initiative of Millennium Promise. Along with The Earth Institute at Columbia University (EI) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), Millennium Promise is one of the three lead partners in the Millennium Villages project which brings together each organization's respective strengths and expertise.

EI is the world's leading academic center for the integrated study of the Earth, its environment and society. EI provides research and expertise on the development of science-based solutions for the Millennium Villages project. UNDP is the United Nations' global development network, an organization that advocates for change and connects countries to knowledge, experience and resources to help people build a better life. UNDP helps coordinate village and national level activities and supports the scaling up of the Millennium Villages project to the national level.

Click here to learn more about the Millennium Villages project.

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Millennium Promise is introducing the MDGs to a wider audience and is providing substantive expertise at a number of prominent international and national forums on MDG-related issues. The latter includes the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting in Davos and its upcoming meeting in Tanzania in May 2010. Other upcoming forums include the UN Global Compact's Annual Summit in New York in June 2010, InterAction's Forum 2010 in Washington, DC, in June, and at Model United Nations tournaments throughout the country.

More fundamentally, the MDGs are essential to Millennium Promise's history. The organization was founded in 2005 by philanthropist Ray Chambers and economist Jeffrey D. Sachs to advance the global agenda to meet the basic needs of the world's poorest people. Our history traces to the UN Millennium Summit in 2000, when heads of state from 189 countries committed to taking concrete action to end extreme poverty by signing the Millennium Declaration, which was later codified into the MDGs.

Three years earlier, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan commissioned the UN Millennium Project, appointing Professor Sachs as director. The Project's final report, issued in 2005, provides a detailed roadmap for how the MDGs can be achieved through simple best practices and current technologies applied within the boundaries of the world's available financial resources. World leaders endorsed the Project's key recommendations at that year's UN World Summit, and made financial commitments to underpin the investments required to achieve the MDGs. That same year, Millennium Promise was formally established to ensure that these major commitments and policy breakthroughs translate into action toward achieving the MDGs.

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The Millennium Village project is made possible through support from a broad array of partners including governments, businesses, international organizations, colleges and universities, faith-based organizations and individuals who provide the expertise, technology and resources that enable the project to fulfill its goals. Globally-recognized companies currently partnering with Millennium Promise include Ericsson, General Electric, JM Eagle, Mosaic, Sumitomo Chemical, Tommy Hilfiger, Zain and many others. Donor government partners for the Millennium Villages project include Japan, Norway and South Korea. UN agencies including the World Food Program and UNIAIDS are important partners. And NGOs across the globe, from John Legend's Show Me Campaign in the U.S. to Tokyo-based Table for Two, are also supporting Millennium Promise and the Millennium Villages project.

As an alliance on the forefront of mobilizing global partnerships to end extreme poverty, there is always interest in exploring new partnership opportunities to support this growing effort. Click here to learn how you or your organization can become involved.

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Millennium Promise is funded by donations by a broad array of supporters and partners, including individuals. A majority of the funds received by Millennium Promise go directly into the budgets for the Millennium Villages, with only 15% allocated for administrative support.

Click here to donate.

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Yes, Millennium Promise is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Contributions to Millennium Promise in the United States are tax-exempt to the extent provided by law.

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We believe in building a dynamic alliance that empowers everyone to be part of the solution. From following us on Facebook and subscribing to our blog to contributing expertise, technological support or funding as a new partner, there are many ways to join the global movement to end extreme poverty and contribute to our work.

Click here to learn how you or your organization can become involved.

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If you can't find what you're looking for on our website, please send us an email at info@millenniumpromise.org and we will do our best to help you find the information you need.

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The Millennium Villages offer a unique, integrated and innovative model for helping rural African communities lift themselves out of extreme poverty. They are currently situated in 14 clusters across ten African countries, and are the result of an innovative partnership between Millennium Promise, the Earth Institute, Columbia University and the United Nations Development Programme.

Millennium Villages are:

• located in hunger "hotspots" where chronic hunger is prevalent, often accompanied by a high prevalence of disease, lack of access to medical care and a severe lack of infrastructure;
• located in a reasonably peaceful nation governed by an accountable government;
• located in districts where NGOs or international donor organizations have been able to work successfully.

Each of the villages is located in a distinct agro-ecological zone—arid or humid, highland or lowland, grain producing or pastoral—to reflect the range of farming, water, disease and infrastructure challenges facing the continent and to show how tailored strategies can overcome each one of them.

Using advances in science and technology, local staff members work with villages to create and implement sustainable, community-led action plans tailored to the villages' specific needs and designed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals.

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The needs of each village—while distinctive—can be met by implementing solutions that are both practical and affordable. For example:

• Agricultural and agro-forestry techniques dramatically increase farm production while enhancing the environment.
• Vitamin and mineral supplements tackle malnutrition and make children stronger.
• Essential health services provide critical, life-saving medicines and raise productivity.
• Targeted investments relieve burdens on women: improved access to water and fuel wood, accessible clinics, mills for grain, and trucking and ambulance services.
• Free, daily school lunches using locally produced food support children's nutrition, learning capacity and school attendance.
• Access to anti-retroviral medicines keep people with HIV/AIDS alive in poor countries just as they do in rich ones.
• Sleeping under an insecticide-treated bed net prevents children from getting malaria, and immunizations will lower the incidence of TB.
• Innovative off-grid energy, water, and information technologies bring not only safe water and energy, but save tens of hours spent each day collecting firewood and water.

Click here to learn more about our cross-sectoral initiatives.

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The approach differs from integrated rural development programs of the 1970s and 1980s or traditional "model villages" in several ways:

• The Millennium Village effort is explicitly linked to achieving the Millennium Development Goals and addresses an integrated set of interventions covering food production, nutrition, education, health services, roads, energy, communications, water, sanitation, enterprise diversification and environmental management. This has never been done before;
• It focuses on participatory community decision-making; For example, at each village, specific committees and community members will evaluate the various possible interventions, including their own ideas, with a scientific team and local partners. Together they will create a package of village-specific interventions, deemed most appropriate and cost effective, and a community action plan for implementation and management of those interventions.
• The initiative uses improved science-based technologies and techniques that have more recently become available, such as agroforestry, insecticide-treated malaria bed nets, antiretroviral drugs, the Internet, remote sensing, and geographic information systems.
• Finally, funding for the Millennium Villages is well within the existing 0.7% envelope of rich-countries' gross national product to Official Development Assistance, reiterated at the 2005 World Summit, the G8 Gleneagles Summit and the Monterrey Conference on Financing for Development.

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Millennium Villages strive to establish a "proof of concept" for broad-based, community-led rural development strategies that aims to show that extreme poverty can be ended in rural Africa.

An external review of the MVP by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), released in November 2008, concluded that that "the MVP has recorded remarkable achievements on the ground" and that it "successfully demonstrates that it is possible to achieve rural development outcomes across a whole range of sectors, even in remote rural villages, with a committed team, the necessary political will and sufficient donor funding, that is well within the boundaries of international donor commitments." The report calls for countries to embed the Millennium Village-approach into their national poverty reduction strategies and also calls upon donors to support these efforts in at least one country in order to take the MVP to national scale.

The success demonstrated by MVP interventions across sectors has already led to, or helped facilitate, their adoption at a regional and/or national scale. The Mwandama site's successful fertilizer support program helped advance Malawi's country-wide agricultural input support program. Several other governments are also preparing plans for expansion of the MV approach to the national level, including Mali and Nigeria.

Click here to learn more about our scale up initiatives.

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Critical to the sustainability of the Millennium Villages is the need to empower the entire community, including women and vulnerable groups by building local technical, administrative and entrepreneurial capacity. The Millennium Villages supports local groups in identifying the pressing problems of most community members, their responsibilities for developing workable and cost effective solutions, and their central role in communicating, designing and managing the initiative locally.

By helping communities to raise productivity, diversify into higher value crops, and promote off-farm employment, incomes will rise in the villages. The resulting economic growth in the villages will enable the communities to finance a growing share of investments to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. Over time, these communities will end their dependency on outside assistance thereby ensuring sustainability.

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The Millennium Villages initiative is supported by Millennium Promise, the UN Development Programme (UNDP), and the Earth Institute, Columbia University. In addition, WFP, UNAIDS, several leading corporations including Ericsson, Novartis, Sumitomo Chemical, and other NGOs are key partners in the project.

The interventions to bring villages out of extreme poverty are implemented by the communities themselves who are empowered to lead in their own development. To ensure success they must give substantially of their time, skills, and resources. Millennium Villages are an investment toward a sustainable end to extreme poverty; therefore Millennium Village communities play a key role in strengthening their local governments and institutions.

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Millennium Villages were selected in consultation with national governments. To ensure that the Millennium Villages are part of national discussion and policy formulation, villages are only initiated in countries where national leadership supports and engages in the Millennium Villages and is committed to investing additional government resources.

Multiple levels of government provide major in-kind contributions and play a key role in the implementation of the Millennium Villages and the identification and application of lessons learnt. The Millennium Villages also rely on existing government implementation mechanisms, such as agricultural extension workers, doctors, health workers, and other government staff who are already working in the villages.

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The Millennium Villages aim to demonstrate that the MDGs are achievable within the bounds of existing global commitments on foreign aid. At the 2005 G8 Summit in Gleneagles, leaders committed to raising their countries' official development assistance levels to 0.7 percent of gross national income by 2015. They also committed to more than double aid to Africa by 2010, which would amount to aid flows of approximately $85 per capita (in 2004 terms). The Millennium Villages project funding model, which calls for between $60-80 per capita of external support mobilized by Millennium Promise, falls within this target. The model includes contributions from all of the initiatives' major stakeholders, including (1) the community; (2) the host government; (3) partners; and (4) the Millennium Promise-mobilized funds. The model invests across sectors including health & nutrition, agriculture & environment, education, infrastructure, gender equality and business development.

There are two phases of the Millennium Villages project, each with its own funding requirement. Phase I includes years 1-5 of a village and Phase II includes years 6-10. When many of the Millennium Villages were launched in 2006, they were funded for their first five years by an original Phase I budget that was determined in 2004. It called for a total of $120 per person per year, broken out as follows:

• Millennium Promise, $60
• Local and National Governments, $30
• Partner Organizations, $20
• The Community, $10

Given that there are approximately 5,000 people per village, the Millennium Promise-mobilized financing need for these villages is about $300,000 per Millennium Village per year.

In 2009, Millennium Promise reevaluated the Phase I budget in light of inflation, lessons learned, and the effects of the 2008 energy price spike. The Phase I budget for a Millennium Village was then adjusted to $160 per person per year, with the following revised allocation:

• Millennium Promise, $80
• Local and National Governments, $40
• Partner Organizations, $30
• The Community, $10

This revised budget which totals about $400,000 per village per year is only applicable to Millennium Villages that receive new donor support. Consequently, most Millennium Village budgets remain at the $120 per capita level. Millennium Promise is currently planning for Phase II of the MV project, which will have reduced Millennium Promise-mobilized support.

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Corruption is a concern in many developing countries, including some where the Millennium Villages are located. Sometimes, perceptions of corruption are used to argue that these countries should not receive any support until corruption has been eliminated. Unfortunately, such an approach would be doomed to fail, since fighting corruption is a long-term process that requires high-level political commitment and sustained support from the international community. Only if countries can pay their policemen adequate salaries, establish computer-based expenditure monitoring systems, and have a strong independent media, can corruption be successfully fought. Poor countries require more support to implement these practical measures against corruption.

The governments of the ten African countries where Millennium Villages are located are fighting corruption and are committed to development. UNDP and Millennium Promise aim to support their efforts to improve the lives of their people. Still, UNDP and Millennium Promise do place paramount emphasis on the transparent and accountable use of their resources. To this end extensive safeguards are in place to trace the flow of funds in each country and to ensure that the funding reaches the intended beneficiaries.

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Poverty can lead to unrest. It is no coincidence that some of the most politically unstable and dangerous places in the world are the poorest, including Sudan, Somalia, and Afghanistan. The countries where the villages are located are among the poorest in the world and therefore politically and economically fragile. A core objective of the Millennium Villages is to support development in these countries to reduce their fragility. While this does not rule out political risks, investments in development will help reduce these risks over time.

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Our world today is inextricably interconnected; we can no longer assume that extreme poverty in rural Africa does not affect us. The environmental, strategic, health safety and moral consequences of extreme poverty affect us every day—to the extent that we must address them directly and urgently.

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There are many organizations, groups and individuals doing great work in Africa. The Millennium Villages, however, are unique in their approach to fighting extreme poverty. An external review of the MVP by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), released in November 2008, concluded that that "the MVP has recorded remarkable achievements on the ground" and that it "successfully demonstrates that it is possible to achieve rural development outcomes across a whole range of sectors, even in remote rural villages, with a committed team, the necessary political will and sufficient donor funding, that is well within the boundaries of international donor commitments."

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Donations to Millennium Promise can be made online with a credit card here.

Donations made by check or money order should be made out to Millennium Promise and mailed to:

Millennium Promise
Attn: Development Department
432 Park Avenue South, 13th Floor
New York, NY 10016