Malawi: Villages get cracking to become MDG achievers

The UN Millennium Village Project is giving 11 Malawian hamlets the chance to break free from the cycle of poverty. About 55,000 people in the settlements, spread across the country, are participating in the five-year project aimed at finding practical solutions to the problems preventing countries from achieving the UN's poverty-slashing Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015. Rather than the 2015 timeframe, the villages "intend to prove that they can achieve at least some of the MDGs in a period of five years", said Peter Kulemeka, assistant resident representative of the UN Development Programme (UNDP) in Malawi.