Millennium Villages Blog

Editor’s Note: This post is a response to Michael Clemens’ post on the Center for Global Development blog entitled "Why a Careful Evaluation of the Millennium Villages Is Not Optional"

We would like to thank Michael for his comments on the evaluation of the Millennium Villages Project and to briefly respond.

1. The need for careful evaluation and long term follow-up. We fully agree. The duration of the Millennium Villages Project is, in fact, 10 years, according to the 2015 MDG timeline. We are now completing the mid-point (end-of-third-year) review of the first five-year phase. We will of course continue to monitor and evaluate the project beyond 2015.
2. The need to compare villages that do get the intervention with those that do not. We also agree with the inclusion of comparison villages. Indeed, once we scaled up the project from the first two sites to 10 countries, we also introduced matched randomly selected comparison villages in 10 of the more recently established sites.

It is very important to add that comparison villages are only a part of the evaluation process. Many key questions, with great potential to generate lessons for replication and scale-up, require a far wider mix of methods and tools. As such, several complementary evaluation strategies are underway in parallel.

We will be publishing the results of the mid-point evaluation of the first phase later this year, and we look forward to an active discussion about the initial findings regarding poverty, hunger, and disease in the Millennium Villages.

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