Center for National Health Development in Ethiopia

Background

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are the world's time-bound and quantified targets for addressing extreme poverty in its many dimensions-income poverty, hunger, disease, lack of adequate shelter, and exclusion-while promoting gender equality, education, and environmental sustainability. They are also basic human rights-the rights of each person on the planet to health, education, shelter, and security.

The MDG’s vision is based on the overall paradigm that poor nations will commit to good governance and science based development policies and scaling-up best practices, and rich countries will commit to much greater financial assistance, access to markets and expanded knowledge transfer to achieve the MDGs.

The United Nations Millennium Project was commissioned by the United Nations Secretary-General in 2002 to develop a concrete action plan for the world to reverse the grinding poverty, hunger and disease affecting billions of people. Headed by Professor Jeffrey Sachs, the Millennium Project is an independent advisory body and presented its final recommendations, Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals to the Secretary-General in January 2005. The Millennium Project has been asked to continue operating in an advisory capacity through the end of 2006.

Millennium Villages Project

Launching ceremony of the Millennium Village in February 2005, Koraro-Ethiopia

The Millennium Villages Project is a project under United Nations Millennium Project, and based at the Earth Institute at Columbia University, that embraces the vision of the MDGs the works of the Millennium Project. It is a bottom-up approach to enabling villages in developing countries to lift themselves out of the poverty trap that afflicts more than a billion people worldwide. It also plans to provide in early success on how to achieve the MDGs. 'The Millennium Village' approach draws upon the leading science-based action plan to fight poverty in rural Africa and meet the Millennium Goals by 2015.

The underlying principles of the ‘ Millennium Village’ approach are:

	Community empowerment through participation and leadership in design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation
	Interventions based on proven, science-based research (biophysical and socioeconomic) combined with the best local knowledge
	Build an existing community, government, and non-governmental programs in the area
	Build capacity and empowerment at the local level
	Strengthen local institutions
	Link with and obtain support from local, provincial and national governments
	Be consistent with national plans for interventions
	Beneficiaries pay part of the way - in cash or in kind - congruent with their ability
	Plan to become self-sustaining
	Scale-up by spreading advances from village to village, from district to district, and from country to country
	“Bottom-up” approaches can produce effective synergies with “top-down” ones