Millennium Village is located. We use this approach because changes in the comparison areas— in particular in the rural area of an MVP site’s province or region—constitute a plausible estimate of the counterfactual, i.e. what would have happened at the MVP site in the absence of the MVP. This does not constitute a rigorous measurement of the MVP’s effects on the treated villages because there could be preexisting differences between the people in the treated villages and the people in the comparator regions. Nonetheless, because it contains information about people who live in places that did not receive the intervention, it is an improvement on simply comparing the treated villages before and after the treatment, as the mid-term MVP evaluation does.

We conduct this analysis for three of the initial 14 village clusters. We selected these cases with two criteria: each village cluster must be 1) covered in the MVP (2010c) mid-term evaluation of June 2010, which reports before-and-after data for five village clusters, and 2) located in a country for which publicly-available Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data can be used to establish broad trends between two recent time points in most of the development indicators reported in the MVP mid-term evaluation. This yields three village clusters: Sauri in Kenya, Bonsaaso in Ghana, and Pampaida in Nigeria.<sup>5</sup> The other two village clusters covered by the MVP mid-term evaluation—Ruhiira in Uganda and Mwandama in Malawi—are in countries where, at the time of writing, data from only one recent DHS survey are publicly available.<sup>6</sup> We compare trends inside and outside the treated villages for two classes of the MVP’s indicators, which we call “inputs” and “outputs.” We make this separation because some indicators might naturally be expected to be more responsive in the short run than other indicators. As used here, an “input” is an indicator whose value could be changed overnight with

> 5 The period consisting of the three years of the program varies by country: 2005-2008 for Sauri, and 2006-09 for Bonsaaso and Pampaida. The DHS data is from 2003 and 2008/09 for Kenya, 2003 and 2008 for Ghana, and 2003 and 2008 for Nigeria. 6 Annex 2 gives the definitions of all indicators used. The Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) are nationally-representative household surveys containing individual-level data on indicators of population, health, and nutrition, carried out by the Measure DHS Project in cooperation with local governments and non-governmental organizations in countries all over the world since 1984. Though they are often used to study maternal and child health, they are representative of all households—not just those with children. Comparable and standardized survey data are collected roughly every five years in many countries and made publicly available at http://www.measuredhs.com. The project is principally funded by the United States Agency for International Development. In July of 2010 the most recent publicly-available standard DHS microdata for Uganda covered the years 2000-1 and 2006, which do not overlap with the MV initial evaluation period of 2006-2009. The most recent data for Malawi covered the years 2000 and 2004, which also do not overlap with the MVP initial evaluation years. DHS surveys from Rwanda (2005 and 2007-08) overlap with the intervention period for the MV site in that country (2006-2009), but indicators for the Rwanda MV site were not published in MVP (2010c).

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