Core Programmes
Health
Health plays a key role in the Millennium Declaration. However, one of the biggest challenges within the health sector in sub-Sahara Africa is that people lack access to health services. Many barriers to access exist: prohibitive user fees, lack of infrastructure, high transport costs, inadequate health knowledge, and certain cultural norms.
Throughout rural communities, people living in extreme poverty continue to die from common preventable and treatable illnesses such as malnutrition, malaria, respiratory infections, diarrhea and HIV/AIDS.
In addition, these diseases have significant impacts on development. The MDG Centre currently coordinates scientific and technical support to the Millennium Villages Project (MVP) and Millennium Cities Initiative in West and Central Africa. The MDG Centre uses the Millennium Villages as proofs of concept to help inform and assist local, regional and national governments in scaling up the following health-related MDG goals :
Gender equality
Promoting gender equality and empowering women and incorporating their views and priorities into national poverty reduction strategies are essential in order to achieve the MDGs.
The MDG Centre’s approach to gender seeks to adapt the dual lens approach to the national reality and to carry-out gender analyses at the micro (MVP sites), meso (smallest decentralized unit) and macro (national) levels.
The dual lens approach will be applied to analyze policy, organizational and delivery systems and mechanisms so as to ensure gender issues are institutionalized.
Education
The strategy is to create a favorable environment for policy reform and increase investment in the education sector to make education available, accessible, relevant, acceptable, and adaptable. The priorities defined by the MVP are:
- Increase student access to school
- Create safer learning environments
- Increase availability of non-formal education opportunities
- Ensure universal school-meal coverage
- Improve the quality of education
Most countries in WCA have made good progress towards the Millennium Development Goals on Education, increasing primary school enrolment by more than 60% over the last five years. The MVP sites school feeding programs (SFP) using locally produced foods promoted by the Centre is having positive impact as they helped to:
- Increase enrolment and retention
- Increase attention and concentration of students
- Provide incentives to parents to send their children to school and allow them to attend it regularly
- Address specific micronutrient deficiencies in school-age children
- Increase community involvement in the education system.
Agro Business Development
Agriculture is crucial for poverty reduction in rural sub-Sahara Africa. The agriculture sector plays two critical roles in the MVP program. First, it is part of a larger social protection program that aims—through public sector investment, capacity development, and targeted transfers—to enable households cover their basic needs, stop a continuous depletion of basic household assets, and enhance the capacity of poverty stricken communities to cope with a continuously evolving climate and society.
Second, it is the engine of economic growth and wealth creation at the local level, which is necessary to generate revenue to sustain service provision in the long run.
Water and Sanitation
The MDG Centre, WCA proposes a strategy that tackles issues related to agriculture water management, drinking water and sanitation issues on a comprehensive way to break the vicious cycle of food insecurity, disease and poverty.
The overall objectives of the water and sanitation strategy are to:
- Improve the productivity of rainfed agricultural systems through better water management leading to an optimization of crop water use
- Improve community health through promotion of safe drinking water and sanitation.