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Background and history
Africa has the greatest proportion of people living in
extreme poverty -- more than 32 percent or roughly 300 million people
living on less than $1 a day. The continent's environmental,
epidemiological and geographical challenges -- including low-productivity
agriculture, a high disease burden, and high transport costs render African
countries most vulnerable to persistent extreme poverty. This means that to
collect safe drinking water and firewood for cooking, people must walk
several miles every day. It means that a child in sub-Saharan Africa
dies of malaria every 30 seconds
, and that 1 in 16 women die in childbirth. With these rural
communities stuck in a poverty trap, they are unable to make the
investments in human capital and infrastructure required to achieve
self-sustaining economic growth.
The following facts depict the gravity
in numbers:
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Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rate of undernourishment in the
world, with one-third of the population below the minimum level of
nourishment.
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At least one million people in Africa die from malaria each
year, 90 percent of these deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa.
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A woman living in sub-Saharan Africa has a 1 in 16 chance of dying in pregnancy. This
compares with a 1 in 3,800 risk for a woman from North America.
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More than 50 percent of Africans suffer from water-related
diseases such as cholera and infant diarrhea.
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In one out of four African countries, half the children
enrolled in the last year of primary school do not pursue their studies the
following year.
The Millennium Villages
project offers a bold, innovative model for helping rural African
communities lift themselves out of extreme poverty. The Millennium Villages
are proving that by fighting poverty at the village level through
community-led development, rural Africa
can achieve the Millennium Development Goals -- global targets for reducing
extreme poverty and hunger by half and improving education, health, gender
equality and environmental sustainability -- by 2015, and escape the
extreme poverty that traps hundreds of millions of people throughout the
continent.
With the help of new advances in
science and technology, project personnel work with villages to create and
facilitate sustainable, community-led action plans that are tailored to the
villages' specific needs and designed to achieve the Millennium Development
Goals.
Simple solutions like providing
high-yield seeds, fertilizers, medicines, drinking wells, and materials to
build school rooms and clinics are effectively combating extreme poverty
and nourishing communities into a new age of health and opportunity.
Improved science and technology such as agroforestry, insecticide-treated
bed nets, antiretroviral drugs, the Internet, remote sensing, and geographic
information systems enriches this progress. Over a 10-year period spanning
two five-year phases, community committees and local governments build
capacity to continue these initiatives and develop a solid foundation for
sustainable growth.
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