November 20, 2013
Nina Munk’s new book, The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty, has received a lot of attention in recent weeks, not least because it is well written, deals with an important subject, and because it goes after a very high-profile champion of development assistance.
It will be recalled that the economist, Jeff Sachs, Columbia University wunderkind, spent time in Poland and Russia at the end of the Cold War advising on the transition from communism to capitalism. His message was a hard one, or at least it was hard on the vulnerable who suffered mightily as the bottom fell out of those countries’ social safety nets. Then Sachs turned his attention to poverty and Africa. His 2005 book, The End of Poverty, was full of outrage at the condition of the world’s poor, and dismay that so little was being done to bring education, clean drinking water, health services and economic opportunity to Africa.
He argued for a “big push” in foreign aid thinking and spending, arguing that poverty could be defeated in less than a generation if the world’s rich countries cared enough, and if the governments of poor countries did the right thing. To prove what was possible, he conceived the idea of Millennium Development Villages—villages in poor parts of poor countries where the lessons of development could be applied in an integrated and sustainable way. It wouldn’t cost much—perhaps $120 per person per year to provide health care, education and economic opportunity. And when the success of the model became clear, it could be replicated across Africa.
There are now 15 Millennium Villages, and the experiment, initially a five-year effort, has been extended to ten. In the process of writing her book, Nina Munk spent a lot of time with Sachs—in Africa, on planes and in the Western capitals where he pitched his vision over and over to donor governments, the UN and some of the world’s largest corporations. She also spent a lot of time in two of the villages, one in Uganda and one on the Kenyan border with Somalia. What she found, despite the Sachs juggernaut, despite the building of schools and clinics and hospitals, despite all the clever ideas about seed and fertilizer and new crops and water piped across hills and valleys to places as dry as a desert in summer, was that it isn’t working.
For villages unconnected to national networks of any kind—roads, education and health systems–the project had to create everything from scratch, building oases of technology and resources in the middle of nowhere. Costs rose. Clinics failed for want of supplies, generators failed for want of parts and fuel, new crops like cardamom could not be sold, and many villagers could not be socialized into new ways of thinking in a few short years. In fact the villagers who resisted are perhaps the smartest people in the story, knowing how risky it might be to abandon the tried and true in favour of fanciful promises from outsiders. For the outsiders it was an experiment; for the villagers it was about survival. There are several lessons in the Millennium Villages Project, or at least in Munk’s book. The first is the one understood by villagers from the start: beware strangers bearing gifts who know nothing about you, your village, your culture or your history. A second lesson is one that should have been apparent to anyone with development experience, before Sachs spent his first dollar: even if you are successful in creating 15 islands of health and prosperity (at $5 or $10 million a time), that’s all they are likely to be without vast additional resources and an exceptional amount of political capital—small, well-resourced islands in a wide and perilous sea. A third lesson is about hubris, and the penchant in outsiders—so evident in the creation every year of hundreds of tiny new NGOs sending starry-eyed voluntourists off to build schools and clinics in Africa—to think they have the answer, and to believe that the world (or Africa) began on the day their plane landed in Nairobi. They should all read this book before takeoff. Or sooner. And there is another lesson. As Nina Munk puts it, “Oversimplification is terribly dangerous.”
The book will probably be seen as another in the growing list of attacks on foreign aid. It is not that. If there is a criticism to be made, it’s in the subtitle. The book is not about Jeffery Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty. It’s about Jeffrey Sachs and His Quest to end Poverty. The quest to end poverty continues, and foreign aid—properly conceived, locally supported and applied with consistency and predictability—has an important part to play.