History
“Millennium Villages throughout Africa are showcasing… how effective an integrated strategy for health care, education, agriculture, and small business can be. We are seeing how to make the most of new technologies. And we are seeing how empowering women can empower whole societies… If other countries do all that you are doing, we can — and we will — achieve the Millennium Development Goals.”– UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon visiting the Millennium Village of Mwandama (Malawi), May 2010.

HISTORY

In 2005, five years after the Millennium Development Goals were established, an inspired group of people began to see it was time to help mobilize the global community to fulfill these promises. Jeffrey D. Sachs, Director of the Center for Sustainable Development (CSD) the Earth Institute at Columbia University and special adviser to the UN Secretary-General on the MDGs, teamed up with Raymond Chambers, a pioneer of private equity investing and a passionate philanthropist, to establish Millennium Promise. 

Millennium Promise became the first international non-governmental organization solely committed to supporting the achievement of the MDGs — and now the Sustainable Development Goals — with a specific mandate to translate the world’s goals into tangible results.

From 2005-15, Millennium Promise provided the operational platform and resource mobilization for the Millennium Villages Project which uses a holistic, science-based approach to benefit more than 500,000 people across sub-Saharan Africa.

Today we continue to build on this work to implement the SDGs through the Sustainable Districts Program, the Lead Farmer Program, Connect To Learn, the One Million Community Health Workers Campaign, and other initiatives.

Major highlights over the last 12 years of MP

  • 2000: UN member countries ratify the MDGs.
  • 2004: Eastern/Southern Africa Regional MDG Center was established in Nairobi, Kenya, by the Earth Institute at Columbia University to provide technical support to MVP.
  • 2005: In partnership with the Earth Institute at Columbia University and the United Nations Development Programme, Millennium Promise launches the Millennium Villages Project to demonstrate that the MDGs could be achieved. Implemented in ten sub-Saharan African countries, the MVP simultaneously addresses the challenges of extreme poverty in many overlapping areas: agriculture, education, health, infrastructure, gender equality, and business development.
  • 2006: MP is at the forefront of policy changes on the fight against malaria. Through the MVP, we demonstrated the efficacy of combining the free mass distribution of bed nets with the mass availability of ACTs. MP was also a founding partner of Malaria No More, an initiative launched at the December 2006 White House Summit on Malaria that seeks to galvanize partnerships and lead a major global advocacy, engagement and implementation campaign for malaria control across Africa. The West and Central Africa Regional MDG Center was established in Bamako, Mali and later transferred in 2012 to Dakar, Senegal.
  • 2016 :
    • MP shifts its focus from the MDGs to their successor, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
    • The MDG Center’s technical expertise is transitioned to MP
    • MP launches the Sustainable Districts Program (SDP), which builds on the innovations and systems developed by MVP, as well as its lessons, challenges and operating principles (integrated, multi sectoral, and multi scale approach, etc.).
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