The Millennium Villages Project: Authors' reply
Authors: Jeffrey D Sachs, Shira Mitchell
Journal: The Lancet Global Health (2018)

We thank Eran Bendavid (May, 2018)1Bendavid E The fog of development: evaluating the Millennium Villages Project.Lancet Glob Health. 2018; 6: e470-e471Summary Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (4) Google Scholar for his thoughtful comments on our evaluation of the Millennium Villages Project (MVP).2Mitchell S Gelman A Ross R et al.The Millennium Villages Project: a retrospective, observational, endline evaluation.Lancet Glob Health. 2018; 6: e500-e513Summary Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (33) Google Scholar We offer several observations on the points that he raised. First, Bendavid writes that the MVP “was said to promote solutions derived from aloof economic models”. We would like to emphasise that the UN Millennium Project recommendations that served as the basis of the MVP came from leading specialists across many disciplines, including medicine, public health, agronomy, ecology, hydrology, civil engineering, business, economics, and others.3UN Millennium ProjectInvesting in development: a practical plan to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. United Nations Millennium Project, New York, NY2005http://csd.columbia.edu/publications/un-millennium-project-reports/Date accessed: April 30, 2018Google Scholar Second, he writes that “on 30 of the 40 measures, the MVP villages are better off, on average, than the comparison villages”. In our data, the MVP villages were better off on 39 of 40 outcomes, on average, with 30 of these attaining the conventional criterion of statistical significance (95% uncertainty interval excluded zero).4Gelman A Carlin J Nallamothu BK ORBITA and coronary stents: a case study in the analysis and reporting of clinical trials.http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/unpublished/Stents_submitted.pdfDate accessed: April 30, 2018Google Scholar Third, the figure of US$600 million is cited in the Comment as the amount of investments over 10 years. According to our on-site spending data, the project spent $160 million over 10 years in the Millennium Village (MV) sites, or $32 per person per year on average. In the MV1s, which were the villages within the MV sites that formed the basis of the evaluation, on-site spending was an average of $46 per person per year. Governments, other donors, and communities also invested in the MV sites as well as in the comparison villages, but we do not know the spending in the comparison sites. This is a limitation of the impact analysis as we cannot compare the total spending in the MV1s and the comparison villages. Finally, Bendavid notes that the MVP may have been “partly undone by its next of kin millennial: the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)”, which “galvanised an enormous amount of goodwill and resources towards many of the same goals as the MVP”. The MVP was launched precisely to promote the MDGs at national and global scales and to demonstrate how the MDGs could be pursued. For example, the MVP helped to spur a Kenya-wide uptake in various disease-control measures.5Ngilu C Kenyan Minister Asserts MVP's Impact on Nation-Wide Malaria Breakthrough.http://millenniumvillages.org/field-notes/kenyan-minister-asserts-mvp-s-impact-on-nation-wide-malaria-breakthrough/Date: Oct 21, 2011Date accessed: April 30, 2018Google Scholar The MVP maintained an MDG policy dialogue with the national governments throughout the project. This online publication has been corrected. The corrected version first appeared at thelancet.com/lancetgh on June 14, 2018 This online publication has been corrected. The corrected version first appeared at thelancet.com/lancetgh on June 14, 2018 I declare no competing interests. The fog of development: evaluating the Millennium Villages ProjectShira Mitchell and colleagues'1 endline evaluation of the Millennium Villages Project (MVP) in The Lancet Global Health marks an important chapter in our understanding of Africa's meandering path towards health and economic development. Originally conceived to show the power of an integrated multisector approach to ending poverty and its associated ills, the project had its share of heated debates.2,3 The centrally planned approach that included provision of a streamlined basket of goods to each village was said to promote solutions derived from aloof economic models insensitive to local customs and constraints. Full-Text PDF Open AccessCorrection to Lancet Glob Health 2018; 6: e730Sachs JD, Mitchell S. The Millennium Villages Project: Authors' reply. Lancet Glob Health 2018; 6: e730—In this letter, the name of the author Shira Mitchell was misspelt. This correction has been made as of June 14. Full-Text PDF Open Access