Source:http://www.haitiregeneration.org/mvp_intro_wsubs
Within the Côte Sud Initiative, the Port-à-Piment watershed will become the first Millennium Village Project (MVP) in the Western Hemisphere.
After two years of research, consultation and collaborative assessments, the community, government, and academic and international organizations identified the town of Port-à-Piment and its accompanying watershed as a community and environmental zone with complex and severe challenges but also immense local capacity. This vital combination offers the right setting and components to demonstrate how to achieve sustained growth and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
The general focus is on achieving large-scale lasting and measurable improvements in all of the MDGs at the village to household level – preceded and accompanied by extensive research and technical development that will provide lessons learned and examples ready for rapid scale up throughout the region and the country as a whole.
Working to achieve the Millennium Development Goals in Haiti
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) underpin the global push to eradicate extreme poverty by 2015. The MDGs are eight quantitative time-bound targets for reducing extreme poverty and hunger by half and improving education, health, gender equality and environmental sustainability. Detailed information on the MDGs can be found at the United Nations website for the Millennium Development Goals.
The latest assessment (August 2011) indicates that currently Haiti is only on target to meet one indicator for MDG 6, related to combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases – however, with the recent and ongoing cholera epidemic, even this achievement may be threatened.
Within this context, the Millennium Villages Project (MVP) offers a bold, innovative model for helping rural communities lift themselves out of extreme poverty. Anchored in science-based and community-driven strategies, the MVP model offers a holistic, intersectoral development approach to address key dimensions of extreme poverty – low income, hunger, disease, gender inequality, lack of education, and inadequate shelter. The model is designed to prove the concept that the MDGs can be attained through a holistic, multisectoral integrated approach to development, with a minimum of $100 per capita investment in direct interventions carefully allocated across a number of sectors such as agriculture, health, education and infrastructure. Other key features of the MVP model include detailed quantitative monitoring and evaluation and high levels of innovation in design, local partnership development and implementation.
The MVP has built up six years of practical experience implementing ambitious and integrated programs in Africa and Asia. The objective of the MVP is simple – to demonstrate practical approaches to achieving the MDGs in the poorest parts of the world. The early results have been dramatic, with major gains in poverty reduction and elimination of hunger, along with important achievements in the health sector, in the fourteen villages found throughout ten sub-Saharan African countries. These impacts have led to major scale-up programs initiated by host governments in a range of locations, including Nigeria, Mali and Timor L’Este. Additional details on the Millennium Villages project can be found at the Millennium Villages Project web site.