'The Millennium Villages Project'' (MVP) grew out of a United Nations summit conference in 2000, where nearly 200 nations agreed on eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)-- including reducing child mortality, promoting gender equality, fighting HIV/AIDS, achieving universal primary education, improving maternal health, and reducing extreme poverty and hunger. Jeffrey Sachs, a Harvard-educated economist who helped liberalize the economies of the former Eastern Bloc countries in the early 1990s, next turned his energies to poverty alleviation and development. From 2000 onward, he served as a key advisor to the UN Secretary-General and many UN agencies on the MDGs. Sach's concept for the MVP was both ambitious and disarmingly simple. Instead of undertaking the small-bore projects--digging a well, repainting a school--that typified much local development work, Sachs' team at the Earth Institute at Columbia University would aim to help rural communities achieve all eight MDGs. To demonstrate the approach, Sachs and his team selected ten main clusters of villages across sub-Saharan Africa.