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Fighting Poverty: Students Present Summer Work with Millennium Villages Project
Twenty-four students in the Master of Public Administration in Development Practice (MPA-DP) program spent the summer of 2010 searching for solutions to poverty in some of the world's poorest communities.
Five student teams completed field internships with the Millennium Villages Project, which helps rural African communities overcome extreme poverty through coordinated improvements to infrastructure, water supplies, education, agriculture, public health, and the environment. Another team did a similar field internship in rural Cambodia.
Right: Students meet UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in Mwandama, Malawi.
View more photos. 
The MPA-DP program is a partnership of SIPA and Columbia University's Earth Institute, which pioneers an integrated approach to sustainable development.
Students learned firsthand about the successes and difficulties of this work. One team spent the summer in Sauri, an impoverished western Kenyan community that was named a Millennium Village in 2004. They found much progress — new crops in the fields, better roads and schools, and health facilities with sources of water and electricity for the first time.
Watch a video of a child nutrition project in Kenya. 
“The community is really involved and I think that's one of the big successes, both with water and with roads,” noted Denise Lee, one of the team's five members.
Other initiatives struggled, however, due to a lack of participation. People who received bed nets to protect themselves against mosquito-borne diseases did not always use them, for example. It was difficult to persuade people to adopt healthy habits, such as hand-washing and a balanced diet.
“Interventions need behavioral change, which is a long-term process,” noted Jiangli Yu, a member of the Sauri team.
The team not only researched development work in Sauri — they helped design and implement it. Students created a survey and distribution system for bed nets using ChildCount, a tool for gathering health information on mobile phones. They taught accounting practices to the staff of a grain bank and made recommendations for improving a credit program for farmers.
This was the first year that students designed their own field internships in various locations, according to Glenn Denning, professor of professional practice at SIPA and the Earth Institute.
Students often identified gaps in local projects and pitched in to fill them, Denning said. They also made recommendations for significant improvements. In the process, they made a lasting contribution to the Millennium Villages Project and gained valuable field experience.
“The students themselves have told me uniformly what a good experience it was for them,” Denning said.
Tim Shenk, 11/22/2010