I am currently reading the Millennium Villages 2008 Annual Report. Here’s some food for thought:
The MVP (Millennium Villages Project) is highlighting the value and feasibility of integrated community-based investments, rather than the one-by-one investment strategies too often deployed in rural areas. Because of budgetary limitations, donors and NGOs too often search for a single “highest impact” or magic bullet initiative that will be most “cost effective”: girls’ education, safe water and sanitation, HIV/AIDS control, livestock, and so forth. One or maybe two of these are deployed in a village, without the benefit of a more holistic strategy. The result, all too often, is the lack of sustainability of the individual investment, and the lack of an overall breakthrough out of the poverty trap. Such one-dimensional strategies fail to reach threshold levels of community capital investment needed to break the poverty trap. Page 55-56