The Millennium Village Project (MVP) is a bit controversial, with many people arguing that it has simply made these villages dependent on international donations, and that once the project ends they will be no better off than they were before, if not worse. Whether or not this is true, I cannot tell you, but what I can tell you is that I think the Millennium Village in Rwanda has a better shot than the villages in other countries. It is unique in that the efforts of the MVP are exactly in line with Rwanda's own domestic development program, Project 2020, and so the Rwandan government gives more funding to the Millennium Village than any other government gives to a Millennium Village in their country. In fact, most of the funding for the MV in Rwanda comes from the Rwandan government.
Our first stop in the Village was to visit a farmer. This man grew cassava (which he taught us how to make into flour), peanuts, and three types of beans, in addition to having some livestock. He told us that the UN had brought a specialist into the Village who had taught them better farming techniques, which he had adopted with much success. They had also brought in fruit trees and showed them how grafting the young trees to mature ones would cause them to grow to maturity and begin to bear fruit in one year instead of six. He also showed us the water pump the Project had given him to pump water out of his pond and through a small pipe so he could draw water from a spicket and more easily water is crops. The pump was broken because it was made of wood and termites had eaten through it, but he said that the Project was going to give him a metal one soon so the termites wouldn't be able to eat through it again.
Our next stop was the health center. It is relatively advances for a rural African health center, offering testing for HIV, malaria, and many other diseases and providing free contraceptives of all kinds to the community (Rwanda is the most densely populated country in Africa, and they're encouraging people to have less children). The center also had a pharmacy with a medicines for most basic illnesses (for anything they don't have they refer people to the nearby hospital), a maternity ward, as well as wards for children, men, and women, each containing about ten beds. Testing and treatment for HIV, as well as contraceptives, are free (as they are everywhere in Rwanda) and all other treatments are made affordable by the government's universal health insurance program, so patients only have to pay 10% of their medical costs. The center would certainly have been deemed alarmingly insufficient by Western standards, but by African standards it's moderately advanced, and one girl in my group who spent last semester studying public health in Kenya thought it was really great.
The highlight of our visit was the visit to the weaving cooperative. It's made up of a group of women in the village who have been taught to make all sorts of things out of native grasses, from baskets and place mats to earrings and bracelets. We got to meet some of the women there, and they taught us how to weave! We sat down on straw mats, each of us with a different woman, and they showed us how to wrap one piece of grass around the others to hold them together, and how to run a needle through completed rows to give our creations shape. It was an interesting experience for multiples reasons, namely because the women only spoke Kinyarwanda, so the teaching was done mostly by her working on the piece for a minute while I watched and then handing it to me, then taking it from me again when I did something wrong, which happened a lot. I'm really bad at weaving. And no, we didn't get to keep our creations. I didn't even finish mine. Honestly I don't even know what it was, it was just a small ring of grass. Instead we worked on our projects for a little while and then went to their shop and bought things that the women had made, which were undoubtedly much better quality than whatever it was I was making anyway. Don't worry, I did get lots of pictures of me weaving though.
I'm skeptical of the MVP's development model of pouring millions of dollars into bringing basic infrastructures and services into a village for a few years, then leaving with the assumption that the villagers now have everything they need to be healthy and to produce enough to make a profit and begin to improve their own quality of life and lift themselves out of poverty. However, I cannot deny that is seems to have done good things for the people of the village we visited, and I think that the government's support makes it likely to continue to be successful even after the project ends.
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