A little girl in a dark red dress runs around laughing. Her mother tries to catch her, before she trips on her ruffles and falls. Florence picks up Nicole and dries her tears. A tender and loving moment between a mother and her young daughter, who is learning to discover the world. A sight like so many others. But this scene has a twist to it: Florence is HIV+ and Nicole is not.
The pair lives in the Millennium Village of Sauri, Western Kenya, and made the trip to Nairobi -- Nicole's first into the big capital city -- to share . . . [more]
'I have always had it in my heart that every child needs and deserves an education, but I previously had no way to realise that dream,' explains Kambunda Evarist, founder and head teacher of St. Evarist Primary School in Ruhiira. Back in 2004, he decided to pool all the resources he had to establish a first rate primary school in his home community.
St.Evarist, a private school, caters for families who can . . . [more]
Laundry soap, margarine, cooking oil, skin moisturizer: all these are products shoppers in developed countries drop into their carts without a second thought. In Mwandama, a remote village in Malawi with no supermarket and limited internet, the community was falling right through the meshes of the consumer grid. But a group of enterprising women has achieved nothing less than a small revolution by effectively turning themselves into sales representatives for the world's second-largest consumer . . . [more]
Located in Western Kenya, Sauri was the first Millennium Village (MV) to see the light in 2005. Five years on, the project area has grown to nearly 70,000 people and has registered numerous successes in its multi-sectoral approach.
The MV team and the community celebrated this at the inauguration of new classrooms at the end of October 2010.
[caption id="attachment_1457" align="alignright" width="150" caption="The Sauri . . . [more]
Martha dusts a small table with flour then starts kneading the dough, before dividing it into tennis-sized balls. Next to her, Jennifer places the balls on a tray and straight into the oven's open mouth. The sweet smell of baked bread suddenly fills the air. A few minutes later, the golden, warm rolls are taken out and brushed with margarine, turning into deliciously shiny pearls. The group . . . [more]
Lunch time in Ruhiira? Look no further. 'Fang Fang' is the place to go for yummy matooke (bananas) and beans. The woman behind this thriving micro-business is Tumushabe Boneconcila, whose entrepreneurial spirit is doing much to both improve the quality of her own life and radically shake up ideas of traditional gender roles in the community. Before the arrival of the Millennium Villages Project (MVP) in 2006, Boneconcila had begun building what would become Fang Fang and . . . [more]
To download this article as a PDF, please click HERE.
The discussion around evaluating large-scale development projects is an important one. Michael Clemens and Gabriel Demombynes offer a critique of the Millennium Village Project (MVP) and its research methods. Their paper misunderstands the MVP's aims and evaluation methods. We respond briefly here, to clarify some of those basic misunderstandings about the project's goals and approaches to evaluation.
1. Goals of the Millennium Villages Project
The MVP is a ten-year project running through 2015, the deadline year for the Millennium Development . . . [more]
Not long ago, next to the Ruhiira Health Centre was a relatively unassuming looking building surrounded by scattered building blocks and cast in the shadow of a towering radio mast which usually had the ICT facilitator Elly Nankunda tinkering at the top of it.
Come July 2010, however, and the place was unrecognisable, transformed into a Community Resource Centre (CRC) which Jeffrey Sachs deemed to be 'the first of its kind in . . . [more]
The first time that US Ambassador Earl N. Phillips heard about Marenyo, a community within Sauri Millennium Village (Western Kenya), was four years ago during a conference. Touched by the story, he decided to support the villagers to fulfill their objective of lifting themselves out of poverty and reaching the Millennium Development Goals. But little did he know then . . . [more]
'Welcome visitors, welcome today, we've all been waiting so long!' Coming over the crest of the hill into the Millennium Village of Ruhiira, Uganda, children's singing voices gradually become louder, intermingled with bursts of clapping and laughter. The long-awaited visitor, Jeffrey Sachs, is due to arrive at any moment, and the anticipation is palpable. Sachs, Head . . . [more]
Agriculture • Business Development • Health • Sauri, Kenya
Recent Comments