The Millenium Villages Project

The Millennium Villages Project was a United Nations initiative conceived and led by economist Jeffrey Sachs and the Earth Institute at Columbia University, a five-year program designed to lift failing villages and hunger hotspots across sub-Saharan Africa toward sustainability by addressing the interconnected challenges of poverty, health, education, and agriculture in a coordinated, community-led way. Photographers from the VII Foundation, Danny Wilcox Frazier, Gary Knight, Ed Kashi, and Ron Haviv, documented the program’s progress across villages in Senegal, Rwanda, Ghana, Ethiopia, and Chad, with field reporting translated into a multi-platform project spanning photography, video, and written journalism.

de.MO designed the book and art directed the exhibition for the project, nonprofit book design and exhibition design work undertaken in close collaboration with the VII Foundation, the United Nations, and the Blue Chip Foundation. The traveling exhibition, housed in a converted school bus, brought the project to over 15,000 students across the United States as part of an educational curriculum developed in partnership with Generation Human Rights. The exhibition was also presented in printed form at the United Nations in New York, putting the stories of these communities before a global audience.