Over the past few months, and most recently in the Washington Post, there have been a variety of articles about the Millenium Village Project. Created and carried out by Jeffrey Sachs and the Earth Institute at Columbia University, the Millenium Village Project attempts to provide destitute villages in Africa with the resources they need to reach subsistence levels. The project provides fertilizer and agricultural education for farmers, a clinic in each village, malaria nets for each bed, and a free lunch at school for children who attend. Looking at the statistics in the test-tube village of Sauri, Kenya, the plan seems to be working. Education scores are up. Crops reached bumper levels for the first time in a generation. Not one reported case of malaria in a year.
So why the plethora of articles? Many are criticizing Sachs’ program as an example of the kind of aid structures the developed world is trying to avoid and redesign. Sachs touts his program as the answer to the perennial aid problem: give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, but how do you teach the man to fish so he can eat forever? And on the surface, it does. But take a closer look, and the questions start popping up. Stephanie Nolen of the Globe and Mail listed a few in her November article:
And the program does raise long-term questions: What happens in five years? Is that enough time to make enough change, solid enough that the kind of sideswiping events that lurk in a place such as Sauri can’t undermine it?
What happens, for example, when Edwina Odit’s granddaughters start secondary school, but then have sex with an older village man to get money to pay for textbooks and end up with HIV? What happens when Ms. Odit needs surgery, can’t afford it, dies, and there is no one left to use the new fertilizer and the farming techniques and grow more food?
What will carry them through a season — or more — when the rains fail? Or when locusts come? Or when they grow ground nuts, but every other village does too, and the price collapses?
And on a larger scale, there is the bottom-line question: Where will the money come from?
Many in Africa also question the worth of the program, including former CIPE partner James Shikwati of the Inter-Regional Economic Network.
In the Western world, however, the long-term sustainability of the Millennium Village Project opens a different debate. Recently, the US Congress especially has focused on the efficacy of aid organizations. Problems of corruption and mismanagement have arisen around the world. Many say current aid strategies don’t work and that new approaches must be created in order to help people effectively with minimal waste. Looking at Sachs’ work in Africa, many dispute his methods as lacking in ‘local buy-in’, one of the key catch phrases in development politics today. And it’s true, the program does lack local investment.
BUT – does that make it an inherently bad way to spend money? The project allows people to raise themselves to subsistence levels and improves the quality of life for villagers. At Sachs’ projected costs of $100 per person per year, doesn’t it seem that the project is succeeding at one of the basic international aid strategems: helping people?
Are the politics getting in the way?
Published Date: April 04, 2006