Millennium Villages Impact Evaluation, Baseline Summary Report

This report presents the baseline findings from the Department for International Development (DFID)-commissioned impact evaluation of the Millennium Village Project (MVP) in Northern Ghana.1 The project will run from 2012 until 2016, with interventions targeting a cluster of communities with a total population of approximately 27,000 people. The MVP has been designed to demonstrate how an integrated approach to community-led development can translate the international Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) into results. It is an approach that has been previously piloted in Kenya and Ethiopia and in 2006 launched at scale to reach nearly half a million people across 10 countries throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. The new Millennium Village (MV) in Northern Ghana is the first to be accompanied by an independent impact evaluation. Details of the conceptual approach and methodology for the evaluation are presented in the Initial Design Document (IDD), with appendices containing the tools used for data collection.2DFI

Preliminary Report of the Midterm District Institutional Study

This study is one of three making up the qualitative part of an independent evaluation of the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) Millennium Villages Project (MVP) (2012–17). Together the three qualitative studies seek to provide an understanding of the qualitative changes happening in the Millennium Village (MV) cluster and control areas as well as serve as an interpretational lens on the quantitative data. Three reports have been written following the fieldwork prior to the synthesis process in September 2015. Each provides one piece of a puzzle that has yet to be assembled. Deeper cross-referencing of the data with the quantitative data has also yet to take place. A synthesised report will be produced once this is done

Millennium Villages Evaluation: Midterm Summary Report

This report presents the midterm findings from an impact evaluation of the Millennium Villages Project (MVP) in northern Ghana. The MVP has been designed to demonstrate how an integrated approach to community-led development can translate the international Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) into results. The project in northern Ghana is one of several instigated over the past 10 years, and is set to reach nearly half a million people across 10 countries in Africa. Central to the MVP approach is the synergistic value of integrated community-based investments, focused on scientifically proven interventions, delivered simultaneously rather than as one-off investments. The premise is that a critical platform of basic needs must be reached before economic development can really take off. The project in northern Ghana has been running in three districts since May 2012, investing over £11 million on health, education, agriculture and infrastructure interventions in 35 communities, and reaching around 30,000 people

Impact Evaluation of the SADA Millennium Villages Project in Northern Ghana: Endline Summary Report

The Millennium Villages Project (MVP) aims to demonstrate how the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) could be achieved locally through an integrated approach to development. While the MDGs have now been superseded by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs, 2016–30), there remains a consistent thread to the MDGs around issues such as eradicating poverty, preventing avoidable deaths and improving education. Furthermore, the interconnected nature of the SDGs means the MVP model also has relevance for those seeking to address extreme poverty by taking an integrated approach to sustainable development. This report summarises the findings from what we believe to be the first independent impact evaluation of the MVP approach. It is hoped that the evidence and analysis will be of relevance to a wide range of actors in international development.Department for International Development (DFID

An impact evaluation design for the Millennium Villages Project in Northern Ghana

This article details the design of an impact evaluation of the Millennium Villages Project in Northern Ghana. The evaluation is particularly challenging because the intervention cannot be randomised; it is clustered in a group of homogeneous communities and likely to generate spill-over effects. We propose a difference-in-differences design selecting control communities based on a propensity score and collecting five rounds of yearly data. We address a number of evaluation questions in relation to testing the breaking of the poverty trap, assessing project externalities, the role of qualitative research, cost-effectiveness and project synergies, sustainability and scalability in the presence of scale economies. © 2013 Copyright 2013 Taylor & Francis