14 landsbysamfund i Afrikas landdistrikter blev valgt ud af FN for at bevise, at de med rette input og støtte kunne nå 2015 Målene – på Madagascar er det tilsyneladende gået godt – men nu ophører den særlige økonomiske håndsrækning gennem fem år.
SAMBAINA, 22 March 2013 (IRIN): A Millennium Village in Madagascar is learning to stand on its own as five years of support from the UN Development Programme (UNDP) come to an end this month.
The Millennium Villages Project dates back to 2004, when it was launched by the UN in conjunction (sammen) with the Earth Institute at Columbia University and the international nonprofit NGO “Millennium Promise”.
Under the leadership of Columbia University’s Jeffrey Sachs, 14 sites in rural Africa, each with a total population of about half a million, were selected to become Millennium Villages.
The project intended to demonstrate how the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs – 2015 Målene) could be realized, testing the theory that a large injection of public investment and foreign aid could boost household incomes, improving savings (opsparing) and local investment.
An average of 60 US dollar (ca. 340 DKR) per person per year was spent trying to improve lives in the Millennium Villages.
The merits of (fordelene ved) such a costly project have sparked intense debate in the development sector.
Some argue that Millennium Village outcomes such as lowered child mortality and improved access to safe drinking water were similar to those in neighbouring areas that were not part of the project.
But Madagascar’s Millennium Village appears to demonstrate that sufficient, targeted investment can speed up development, even in a country that has experienced four years of political crisis and near-zero percent economic growth.
Following a coup in 2009, international donor funding to Madagascar was largely frozen, and government investment in social sectors has been almost non-existent; the country as a whole has no hope of achieving the MDGs by the 2015 deadline.
But funding for the Millennium Villages Project continued unabated (uberørt), yielding positive results for the test community.
Targeted investment
Læs videre på
http://www.irinnews.org/Report/97706/Madagascar-s-Millennium-Village-goes-it-alone
