Sauri - Millennium Villages Project

The Sauri cluster is the first and largest site in the MV project, with 11 Millennium Villages and a population that has grown to approximately 75,000 people. Located in the Siaya District in western Kenya, approximately 40 km (25 mi) from the main city center of Kisumu, Sauri is in the maize bi-modal agro-ecological zone, and features a landscape characterized by narrow streams, rivers and wetlands meandering through rolling hills. The cluster’s subsistence farmers rely on maize and beans as their staple crops. The main season planting takes place in March for August harvest, and off-season planting takes place in October for December harvest. Before the Millennium Villages project, the most significant challenges in Sauri were HIV/AIDS, malaria and tropical diseases, food insecurity, soil nutrient depletion, difficult roads and inadequate infrastructure, and a shortage of improved water sources. Despite these challenges, Sauri has made substantial progress and is gaining the momentum it needs to escape the poverty trap. 

Before the start of the project in 2004, the Sauri cluster was beset by a number of challenges. One of the most critical was food and nutritional insecurity. Poor food crops (mainly maize and beans) resulted in a period of hunger that lasted over three months per year and malnutrition among children was high. Without school meals, children were absent from classes so that they could perform menial jobs to earn some income to buy food. Disease burden was a big challenge to the community, especially malaria outbreaks, where almost half of the entire population would be infected at any given time. Water sources were far from the community, especially during dry seasons resulting in community members spending many hours to fetch water from contaminated sources. Despite a tarmac road to the cluster, the access roads into the villages and households were completely impassable, especially during the rainy seasons.