Ruhiira, Uganda

The Ruhiira Millennium Village cluster, a group of eight villages, is located in the mountainous southwestern highlands of Uganda near the Tanzanian border. More than 90 percent of its population make their living as subsistence farmers.  Faced with isolation from markets, low education levels, and lack of opportunity, Ruhiira represents the poorer part of Uganda’s Mbarara district, with close to half its inhabitants earning less than one dollar a day.

Notre Dame’s partnership with the people of Ruhiira was established in September 2006 after a member of the Notre Dame Board of Trustees generously committed to fund development activities in one village of the Ruhiira cluster in Notre Dame’s name.

The Millennium Villages Project (MVP), of which Ruhiira is a part, is rooted in the idea that impoverished villages can transform themselves and meet the the UN’s Millennium Development Goals by 2015 if they are empowered with proven, powerful, practical technologies.  Villagers themselves own and drive the five-year investment strategy, which includes a broad range of interventions that simultaneously address the specific needs of each village.  Goals include increasing agricultural productivity, eliminating preventable diseases, improving access to basic health care and education, and improving basic infrastructure in order to connect people to information and markets.  Each Millennium Village requires an external funding commitment of $300,000 per year for five years.

The Millennium Village Project, originally the brainchild of economist Jeffrey Sachs, has grown to encompass ten clusters of villages across Africa, with funding and administration shared by a variety of donors and institutions.  In Uganda, the MVP is administered by Sachs’s Earth Institute at Columbia University, Millennium Promise (an NGO), and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The Ford Program works with these institutional partners to identify opportunities for Notre Dame undergraduates and graduate students to conduct community-based research projects and internships in Ruhiira.  Students work with MVP staff members to carry out projects in sectors such as health, education, enterprise development, and community mobilization.  The goal is to link students to the village in the cluster where their particular expertise can satisfy a specific community need identified by local inhabitants and MVP staff working on the ground.