Millennium Villages

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The Millennium Villages - 12 villages, selected so they represent challenged villages in all major types of climates in Africa, receive coaching from top institutes in a challenge to lift them out of poverty within a couple of years. Let's see if these experts are worth their talk... The United Nations is one of the organizations that took up the challenge.

Wouldn't it make sense for the OLPC community to align this endeavour and specifically target these 12 villages for a next XO deploment?

The Millennium Villages seek to end extreme poverty by working with the poorest of the poor, village by village throughout Africa, in partnership with governments and other committed stakeholders, providing affordable and science-based solutions to help people lift themselves out of extreme poverty.

The 12 villages are:

1. Sauri, Kenya
   1. Sauri is quickly showing progress and potential when life-saving interventions are introduced into a village and communities are empowered with the means to pull themselves out of poverty. In 2004, Sauri, located in Western Kenya's Siaya District, became the first Millennium Village. The rural community of 5,300 people made a commitment to pulling itself out of poverty, but lacked the means to do so.
2. Koraro, Ethiopia
   1. Surrounded by jagged peaks and dusty arid land lies Koraro, a small remote village of 5,000 eking out an existence in northern Ethiopia, one of the poorest countries in the world. A small school can only house six grades. The seventh graders sit out in the hot sun under the shade of a large tree in the village. And even so, half of the children in Koraro, more than 1,500, are malnourished and have little time for focusing on education.
3. Bonsaaso, Ghana
   1. In western Ghana more than 5,000 people live in a medium-sized village called Bonsaaso. They rely heavily on their small-scale farms to produce crops such as cocoa, oil palm, yams, and cassava. Production output, however, is low and because most of the focus is placed on cash crops especially that of cocoa, growing food crops is neglected. As a result the area is wrought with severe malnutrition. Children's diets are almost entirely made up of starches.
4. Pampaida, Nigeria
   1. Pampaida is located in the northern Nigerian state of Kaduna. No source of electricity exists in except for one private generator. Firewood is the main source of energy, but because of highly degraded vegetation firewood has become scarce. There is a yearly food shortage in Pampaida, which ranges from three months of hunger in a good year to five months of hunger in a drought year.
5. Mayange, Rwanda
   1. Mayange is a village of returnees--roughly 5,000 people or 1,005 households--who came back to Rwanda after the 1994 genocide. Surrounding settlements bring the surrounding population to roughly 50,000.
6. Mwandama, Malawi
   1. Nearly 90 percent of the people of Mwandama Village, located in southern Malawi, live below the poverty line--less than $1 a day. The people of this remote village, numbering more than 5,100, live quietly almost seven kilometers away from the closest dirt road. Children also have to travel that same distance to get to school and for water which is often muddy and undrinkable.
7. Potou, Senegal
   1. Potou is located in the Niayes zone of Senegal, bordering the maritime fringe of the north of the country. Potou was selected to be a Millennium Village mainly because of its inhabitants' reliance on a combination of fishing and agriculture, and because of the threat posed by the movement of dunes to the depressions where horticulture activities are undertaken. It represents the very important coastal-artisanal fishing farming system.
8. Tiby, Mali
   1. Donkey-pulled carts are a common sight in the dusty roads of Tiby. Villagers use them to bring their goods to local markets which sometimes are up to 10 kilometers away. Equally as far are the paved roads where the goods can be transported to larger townships. It is an arduous task for many to sell a cart-load of crops.
9. Mbola, Tanzania
   1. The situation in Mbola is stark. The children have faces hardened by years of adversity that belie their youth--living in one of the poorest regions of Tanzania. They are everywhere in this village, and immediately you notice their stunted height and distended bellies, telltale signs of malnourishment. But despite all this, they are still children and they remain cheerful and playful especially when there is a makeshift soccerball to be kicked around.
10. Dertu, Kenya
    1. The village in Dertu represents the pastoral farming system at the desert margins of tropical Africa. The means of livelihood are centered on nomadic pastoralism coupled with some business. Fuelwood is the main form of energy and is predominantly collected by women and children. The collection distance is increasing due to depletion from the village environs.

Suggested Links:

1. Millennium Development Goals
2. Agenda 21-The Plan of Action to help Humanity make it beyond the Year 2100
3. Millennium Villages
4. What is an Open Hardware Project
5. What is an Open Software Initiative
6. What is an Open Community Initiative
7. http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/mv/mv_closer.htm