Short Description:
Millennium Promise (MP) is a not-for-profit organization that aims to address the many aspects of extreme poverty in Africa. MP is seeking to launch self-sustaining businesses in several clusters in Africa. GSB students will be working with MP to develop business plans and conduct market research. Opportunity exists, to travel to Africa (at subsidized cost) and work locally, at the end of this phase of the project.

Background:
The Millennium Villages Project (MVP) was launched in an effort to establish a model for broad-based, community-led, development strategies to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in rural Africa. The project therefore supports a basic set of integrated interventions in health, education, energy, infrastructure and environmental management. In addition it has sought to improve the incomes of the poor by providing high quality seed and fertilizer.
The first of these projects was launched about three and a half years ago. Today, there are ten countries and 14 clusters in which the model has been replicated. Through the sustained introduction of these interventions considerable improvements have been made in each of the fields and it has resulted in an improved quality of life, and in most cases, to the alleviation of hunger.

We believe that this cannot be achieved without a major boost in agricultural productivity. For biophysical reasons relating to its rain-fed agriculture, unique crop mix, and limited transport infrastructure, Africa is the one region in the world not yet to have experienced a “green revolution” in agricultural productivity. The region’s cereal yields have been stagnant at approximately one ton per hectare for the past generation. Meanwhile, growing population pressures and decreasing plot size have resulted in broadly documented soil nutrient mining and commonly decreasing food production per capita. Given the centrality of agricultural productivity to long-term economic transformation, the Millennium Village project has therefore placed a special emphasis on ensuring sound science-based interventions to boost yields in staple crops, and subsequently in cash crops.

Detailed Description:
Millennium Promise is seeking to launch self sustaining businesses in a number of its clusters.
There are three main projects that require business plans:

• Senegal - Business plan development of market opportunity for Hibiscus products. The women in the cluster grow 50 hectares of Hibiscus and they want to know if/what market opportunities exist. They are considering fortifying the hibiscus compound for use in a school feeding program for children.
• Mali - Farmers grow rice in the Niger River and cattle eat the rice stalks after the harvest. Cattle population grows to over 100K but they are not currently milked. This project would look into the feasibility of a milk collection/production scheme. Would also consider fortifying the milk to use in a large-scale school feeding program.
• Uganda - Continuation of a project CGC began last year involving the distribution of efficient cook stoves. A new Millennium Promise partner has joined and wants to consider increasing scale of project. The partner also requires help identifying new opportunities in the value chain.

The Senegal and Mali projects require the student consulting teams to visit the site at the end of the quarter. This site visit will be used to learn more about the region and also quantify or verify assumptions made in the business plans to access project feasibility. The students' travel expenses will be partially subsidized through a CGC corporate sponsor. We estimate trip costs will be approximately $1200 - $2000 with the subsidy.

Students will be working remotely with the Director of Business Development and the clusters for the first phase of the project.  We recommend students begin discussing and planning trip details with MP as soon as possible to help ensure costs can be kept to a reasonable level.

Team structure:
Total of 4-6 students with 2-3 students assigned to each project.

Resources available to student project team:
Rustom Masalawala, Director of Business Development at Millennium Promise, and/or his assigned team member(s)

Millennium Promise Country managers

Possible contact with clusters working locally that are assigned by the Director of Business Development.

2nd year GSB student who will mentor the 1st year project team

Timeline:
2nd week of October – 1st week of December.  Site visit from December 13th – 20th.

Deliverables:
PowerPoint presentations, market research write-ups, business plan write-ups..

Useful resources:
Millennium promise website: http://www.millenniumpromise.org/