Millennium Promise

Millennium Promise, or The Millennium Promise Alliance, Inc., is a non-profit organization incorporated under the laws of the State of Delaware, dedicated to ending extreme poverty within our lifetime. Its flagship initiative is the Millennium Villages Project, which highlights how integrated, community-led development, even in some of the poorest communities across rural sub-Saharan Africa, can lead to progress in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and can provide communities with the basic tools and necessities to break out of poverty, on the path toward self-sustainable development. Millennium Promise oversees the Millennium Villages Project in collaboration with the Earth Institute at Columbia University and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).

The project reflects Millennium Promise's focus on simultaneously addressing the inter-connected challenges of poverty - which include hunger and malnutrition, disease and lack of access to health care, poor education, and insufficient infrastructure, among others. The organization engages partners from the private and public sectors, national governments, and individuals in support of its work in the Millennium Villages and for a broader policy and advocacy agenda in support of the MDGs. As such, Millennium Promise recognizes the critical importance of partnerships in addressing the many dimensions of poverty. Among the Millennium Promise MDG Global Leaders are fashion icon Tommy Hilfiger, the founder of Diesel, Renzo Rosso, and Senegalese musician and UNICEF ambassador Youssou Ndour.

A central goal of Millennium Promise, using the platform of the Millennium Villages Project, is to demonstrate the power of practical, low-cost and community-led approaches to poverty alleviation that can be replicated at scale by developing nations around the world. Through the Millennium Villages Project, Millennium Promise works in over 80 villages across ten different countries in sub-Saharan Africa — Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, and Uganda. Each Millennium Village site is a cluster of a village or villages, of approximately 5,000 inhabitants per cluster.

Millennium Promise was co-founded by the renowned international economist and Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, and philanthropist and Wall Street leader Ray Chambers in 2005. The organization is headquartered in New York, New York, with regional headquarters in Bamako, Mali and Nairobi, Kenya, and national affiliates in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. Peter Neidecker is CEO of Millennium Promise. Prior to joining Millennium Promise, Mr. Neidecker served as the director of programs for the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation in London.

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