The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty by Nina Munk

Author:Nina Munk [Munk, Nina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780385537742
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-09-10T07:00:00+00:00

How would they continue? “I know that if you spend enough money on each person in a village, you will change their lives,” Simon Bland was saying. “If you put in enough resources—enough mzungu, foreigners, technical assistance, and money—lives change. I know that. I’ve been doing it for years. I’ve lived and worked on and managed development projects.”

A senior officer with Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID), Bland had spent thirty years working in the field of development. He’d run DFID’s offices in Russia, in Ukraine, in Somalia, and in Kenya, implementing and overseeing countless development projects in many of the world’s poorest places. Now he was trying to decide whether DFID should back Jeffrey Sachs and his Millennium Villages Project. His main concern was “sustainability”; what would happen when funding for the Millennium Villages ran out?

Broken water pumps, half-finished health care clinics, abandoned housing blocks, roads that lead nowhere, dams that have collapsed—Africa is strewn with the remains of well-meaning development projects, Bland pointed out. “The problem is,” he said, “when you walk away, what happens?” Who will fill the potholes and mend the pipes and pit latrines? Who will buy fuel and supply spare parts for the generators? Who will pay Dr. Buhamizo’s salary?

Jeffrey Sachs had designed the Millennium Villages Project with a timeline of five years; at that point, according to his model, the villages would be self-sufficient. To quote an internal memo distributed to Sachs’s senior staff: “Sustainability within the Millennium Villages Project has one precise meaning: When the five-year MV funding stops … the MVs should be able to continue their economic progress without a loss of momentum, a drop in living standards, or a decline in social services.”

But what if Sachs’s model was unrealistic? What if, after all, economic development did not advance along a straight upward line but instead, like the stock market, flatlined? By 2008, even Sachs could see that a five-year timeline was overly ambitious. People in the villages were healthier and better nourished than they had been. Nevertheless, the long-term goals of the Millennium Villages Project—to set people on the path of sustainable economic progress, to teach them self-sufficiency, to lift them out of extreme poverty—were as elusive as ever. As for scaling up, that goal too remained unfulfilled.

Revising his timetable, Sachs announced that the Millennium Villages Project would extend for ten years instead of five. This change in timeline was by no means an admission of failure; it was a minor adjustment, he told me, a “course correction.” “There is no blueprint for what we’re doing—our ideas continue to evolve all the time,” he said. “The main thing is to add another block of time to really get the income levels significantly raised. The plane is flying and it’s gaining altitude—now we just need to ensure a smooth flight.” But where would money for the second block of time come from?

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