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A study published in The Lancet says the Millennium Village Project (MVP) is responsible for adecline in child mortality three times faster than comparablevillages that are not a part of the intervention. The authors saythe positive gains are the result of a successful program. However,critics have responded to the study citing serious errors in theanalysis. The MVP was established as a part of the Millennium Development Goals , a set of global targets aimed at reducing poverty and improvingthe quality of life for people in the world s poorest nations.Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs lead the development of the MVP based on the theory thatincreasing the level of spending per person through a comprehensiveset of interventions will help lift people out of poverty. The MVP is still a pilot program and runs in 9 different villagesacross Africa. The recent study shares data from the first three years of theMVP. According to the researchers, the under-five death rates incontrol villages declined an average of 2.6 percent each year overthe course of a decade. The MVs averaged of 7.8 percent rate ofdecline per year. The data published in The Lancet study (click here) show promise for the success of the MVP. Soon after publication, a few individuals raised some concernsabout the study s findings. An article in Nature quoted researcher Michael Clemens of the Center for Global Development . Using figures in the paper, Clemens calculated that the studyauthors can be confident only that the annual rate of decline forchild mortality in the Millennium Villages lies between 1.4 percentand 14.3 percent. If you claim to triple rates of decline youmust have the evidence to back this up, he said. For Clemens, this means that the study s claim that, the averageannual rate of reduction of mortality in children younger than 5years of age was three-times faster in Millennium Village sitesthan in the most recent 10-year national rural trends is nottrue. Further complicating the issue is that the evaluation is done bythe people who implement the MVP. Clemens and others havecriticized this decision in previous studies. For critics, a newMVP established in Ghana will be evaluated by DfID (the British Department for International Development ). Though it is likely all parties will not be satisfied after theindependent evaluation, an outside perspective on the project incooperation with the MVP will quiet some of the criticisms. Lee Crawfurd further points out the observed differences in 10 of the 18 indicators in the studyare statistically insignificant. For example, the increase in theasset-based wealth index for households are nearly identicalbetween the MVP and comparison villages. Further, Matt Collin analyzes the data from the MVP study andcompares it to recent country-level data on under-five mortality published in The Lancet just a few days prior to the MVP study. (See his chart here.) He determines that the rate of decline in the MVPs are on pace withnational averages over the same period. An even closer look at theMVP study by Gabriel Demombynes, author of the national averagesstudy, and Espen Beer Prydz in the World Bank blog uncovers some serious errors by the MVP authors. In short, the comparison data should be calculated from the midpoint of the observation, rather than the end. The shift to the middle four years for the MVs and the comparisonvillages yields very different results. The MVPs are slightlybehind national averages for that period, but are so close that itis statistically insignificant. In other words the MVs are reducingunder-five mortality at the same rate as the rest of the country . The discussion is important, say the critics, because of thepopularity and cost of the MVP. According to the study, it costs$116 per person per year. For the 30,000 people in the MVs that isan annual cost of $3.48 million per year. Diverting scarceresources towards this project's approach means that other,competing uses of that money will not occur. Such mass diversion ofresources can only be done responsibly when it is shown that thenew use of the resources does more to end poverty than thealternative use of the resources, says Clemens. The burden ofproof lies on the project to demonstrate that the diversion doesmore to end poverty than other uses of that money. This morning, more than a week since the paper s release, theauthors of the paper issued a correction saying, We thank Demombynes and others for pointing out thesecorrections, and as noted we have withdrawn the erroneous claims asa result. To improve the performance of the project going forward,we are inviting international public health experts along withcritics of the project to join an independent expert committee toreview the data collection and help improve its accuracy. I am an expert from nail-polish-stickers.com, while we provides the quality product, such as China Nail Polish Stickers , Rhinestone Phone Stickers, French Manicure Nail Stickers,and more.
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