Economist Jeffrey Sachs spearheaded the Millennium Village Project to create sustainable economies in villages in sub-Saharan Africa. Photo: kevin813 (flickr)

If you had millions in cash and a team of some of the most brilliant minds in development, could you transform a poor African village's extreme poverty to a viable economy in five years?

The Millennium Village Project (MVP) is trying to do just that. It is the ambitious, high-profile development initiative spearheaded by economist Jeffrey Sachs in 2004. Today the Millennium Village Project operates in 13 sites across sub-Saharan Africa. Each site has tailored projects aimed at improving health, education, agriculture, infrastructure, and commercial business, and relies heavily on local participation. According to their website, MVP says that by 2011 their role will shift from financing and implementing projects, to a more advisory one.

Jeff Marlow, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, recently visited one MVP site comprised of 11 rural villages in the Koraro region of Ethiopia. While he was there he wrote about his experience for the Nicholas Kristof's On the Ground blog.

Of the several posts he wrote, the "Sustainability Factor" was by far the most interesting to me. The MVP acknowledges that sustainability is crucial to success, but these villages aren't self-sufficient despite several years of support. Though Marlow found that huge gains were made in education and health, economic sustainability remains elusive:

What began as a five year initiative to end extreme poverty and send the Millennium Villages on their way toward further economic development has now ballooned into at least a 10-year program with no clear end in sight....

It’s hard to deny that the quality of life in Koraro has increased substantially: disease rates have plummeted, crop yields have gone up, and children are attending school at unprecedented levels. Does this mean the Project will accomplish its lofty goals and, as Sachs puts it, “end the dependency on help and create the kind of breakthroughs that will have a transformative effect on the world”? ...The Project faces fundamentally different challenges in scaling up and moving out than it has seemingly overcome in raising crop yields and cutting disease rates.

It looks like the millions in cash, brilliant minds, and local determination haven't succeeded in creating sustainable economic growth for these 11 villages. Maybe another five years will make the difference? We can only hope so.

Can a small group of people lift themselves out of poverty if given enough capital?

Economist Jeffrey Sachs and the U.N. Millennium Village project are aiming to do just that. Through a community-led approach, the Millennium Villages Project addresses extreme poverty in rural Africa through projects designed around achieving the Millennium Development Goals — eight agreed-upon targets to end extreme poverty worldwide by 2015.

In total, there are 79 Millennium Villages spread across the continent, that are grouped in 12 clusters. The villages are located in different agro-ecological zones that are representative of the farming, water and disease challenges facing the continent. Sachs believes this is why the Millennium Village Project is a scalable model that can be adapted across the different regions of Africa.

Sachs' theory suggests that starting with a big commitment to just these few villages and their small-scale farming might be the key to poverty alleviation. Each Millennium Village Project team works through poverty issues in each village by providing access to advanced technology that can better health, education, and farming productivity. For example, agricultural techniques have been improved by the introduction of fertilizers and crop diversification.

There are still many skeptics of the Millennium Villages' approach to ending poverty. Relaxing taxes on imports like fertilizer could do more argues development consultant Sam Rich in The Wilson Quarterly. These villages may have seen some positive impact early on but many persistent issues remain: dependence on subsistence crops is still depleting the soil and major infrastructure issues, like bad roads and a lack of electricity, have still not been addressed.

Last week I had the chance to visit a Millennium Village called Tiby, located in Mali, West Africa. I had expected to witness a tightly run program, with strong, scalable results. Instead I was shocked to see how disorganized the program was and how little had been accomplished by its third year. The community-based committees in Tiby were in place but had yet to receive any training in planning or management.

Each Millennium Village costs $110 per person every year over a period of five years. The majority of the funds come from donor funding through the Millennium Villages program but also include funding from local governments, partner organizations, and the villagers themselves.

It's easy to criticize the Millennium Village approach for spending a lot of money on a relatively small a group of people but let's this into perspective. In the first six months of 2008, the U.S. government contributed $830,353,769 to the World Food Program. That same amount would be able to support 1.5 million people through the Millennium Villages Project. In the long-run, the per-person investment through the Millennium Villages Project actually saves money — if the project proves successful, and the beneficiaries become self-sufficient and no longer depend on distributions from humanitarian aid groups.

So, can a small group of people really lift themselves out of poverty if given enough capital?

My own impression of the project, albeit from the vantage point of a single village, is that it is a band-aid for the symptoms of poverty, rather than a program that effectively addresses the root causes. The initiative's statistics may suggest otherwise, but the reality is that there is no quick fix to alleviating extreme poverty.