The Millennium Villages Project
Millennium Villages Project is an interactive classroom curriculum and traveling museum touring schools across the United States. This educational project, in which VII photographers revisit villages across the African continent, aims to teach students about sustainable development and solutions to extreme poverty through the successes of the ten-year project first created by Jeffery Sachs.
In 2015, the world nations agreed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and move humankind toward prosperity, social inclusion, and environmental sustainability. Can United Nations goals make a difference? The evidence is powerful and encouraging. To illustrate the progress made, the visual storytellers of VII, with support from the Blue Chip Foundation, have documented the Millennium Villages, a ten-year project created by economist Jeffery Sachs of Colombia University in ten African countries, which worked toward eliminating extreme poverty in focusing on its root causes. Developed to improve the quality of life for villagers in some of the poorest communities on the African continent, the project addressed multiple sectors, including health, education, and infrastructure.
The Millennium Villages Project aims to show hundreds of thousands of people’s progress and demonstrate to the world that ending extreme poverty is possible. These experiences can help guide the more significant efforts of development organizations, governments, and the public.
As the world embarks on achieving Sustainable Development Goals, we are responsible for learning from what we have done in the past and moving toward making a sustainable future for all.
The Millennium Villages Project in Exhibition
In 2019 the MVP Mobile Exhibit Bus toured schools in over 20 cities in the Northeast, Midwest, and Southwest of the United States. Thousands of 8th-12th grade students learned about sustainable development and solutions to extreme poverty with our interactive classroom curriculum and traveling museum.
The exhibit plans to travel to schools on the West Coast of the US in 2022. The curriculum was developed by Generation Human Rights and the bus was outfitted and run by Photoville. The project is supported by the Blue Chip Foundation.
