Moving Towards Sustainable Community Development:

After discussing important components of sustainable community development (SCD), the paper embarks on Millennium Village Project(MVP) implementation mainly focusing on the Koraro cluster MV in Ethiopia. MVP is a project designed by renowned scientists including Jeffry Sachs at Earth Institute, in partnership with Millennium Promise, and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). It has been under implementation starting from 2005 in 15 disadvantaged remote cluster villages in ten African countries each with an average estimated 5000 households with an objective to facilitate the achievement of MDGs. Using qualitative and quantitative data gathered from the Koraro MV site, this paper made vital recommendations to ensure the sustainability of this project. Supporting arguments from the Sauri MV site in Kenya made by other scholars was also used in order to increase the applicability of the recommendation to other MVs. The findings show that MV lacks important components of sustainable community development (SCD). SCD is a strategy for development which seeks to balance environmental, economic and social benefits. In order to ensure sustainability of the achievements, the MVP needs to empower the community through community capacity building and participation.