Last time, our whirlwind tour of Professor Jeffrey Sachs’ The End of Poverty took us to Africa and his explanation of the relatively cheap, simple on-the-ground investments which he argues offer hope for the end of extreme poverty by 2025. Next, we’ll zoom out and look at his proposals at the national and global scale. But first, we should look at the local level in a bit more detail. Sachs doesn’t just write articles and give speeches, though he does that a lot. With the help of two organisations he also runs - the Earth Institute and the UN Millennium Project - he’s trying the approach out in villages across the northern part of sub-Saharan Africa. They’re called the Millennium Villages, and they give us a great opportunity to see if Sachs’ proposals really work.

The first Millennium Village was one which Sachs had already done some work in - Sauri, in Kenya. The project began in 2004. Now, the project has extended to 78 villages in 12 clusters, spread across 10 countries*. They’ve been selected to try the approach on a range of different agricultural conditions, in terms of soil type and climate. They’ve also, the project states, been chosen in countries where the government is reasonably efficient and corruption-free and committed to supporting the project. Because it’s been going the longest, most of the analysis and media coverage has focussed on Sauri, and the second village to begin the program, Koraro in Northern Ethiopia, which started the program in 2005.

So what is the project, and how does it work? Well, the short version runs thus: for five years, the project invests substantial amounts into each village to help it meet a package of over 40 interventions for basic needs like agricultural productivity, health, education, infrastructure and communication. The idea is that with this help, the villages can begin selling surplus agricultural products and other goods to other areas, and begin on the path of economic growth. The villages would have broken out of the “poverty trap” which Sachs argues prevents them from enjoying the benefits of trade.

So how does it work? The project has calculated that the investments needed cost $110 per person per year. This amount is provided from a range of sources: the villages themselves are required to provide $10; the government of the country in question $30; and rich-world donors $70. Those donations come from a mixture of governments, the UN, and private donors through Sachs’ public face of the project, Millennium Promise.

The initial focus in each village is agriculture. The project gives farmers free or subsidised fertiliser and seeds for the first few years, on two conditions: that the subsidies are phased out by year five, and that the farmers commit some of their yield to providing free meals in the local school. The results have been impressive: in Sauri in the first year, maize yields increased by 3.5 times; in Koraro, where a more mixed range of crops is grown, the first-year increase was a whopping 8.4 times. Some of this is down to improved rainfall, but at least a doubling of productivity is down to the investments, the project estimates (this powerpoint presentation by one of the project’s founders gives the stats on pages 16-18). From a starting position of widespread malnutrition, the first four villages now have only 8% of their population “food insecure” (without a stable, reliable year-round food source). Furthermore, it gives the villages the chance to sell excess crops for cash income. Crop storage - “cereal banks” - enable the villagers to take advantage of variations in price throughout the year: crops kept until April earn double the price of those sold after harvest the previous August.

The villages’ second priority is health. In Sauri, the project built a clinic in just six weeks, and the project pays a doctor to hold surgeries two days a week. The focus is on cheap, targeted interventions that offer the maximum gain: for example, anti-malaria bednets (see them in action, albeit distributed by a different group). More expensive treatments for Malaria are also provided. Again, the headline results are impressive: when the project began, 40% of the village was infected with malaria, one of the continent’s worst killers; that’s now down to 20%. HIV testing and anti-retroviral treatment is planned. In addition, free contraceptives are distributed to help reduce unplanned births and, by extension, infant mortality.

While these interventions start the process, the emphasis is very much of a bundle of changes made all at once, from ensuring safe water and toilets to obtaining electricity and safe cooking fuels. The first annual report of the Sauri and Koraro projects outlines in detail the packages of interventions.

All well and good. The problem, of course, is that all of these results are based on heavy donor contributions. The big idea of Sachs’ book - and of the Millennium Villages project - is that, by breaking the poverty trap, aid-backed interventions can place Africa on the road to growth, so aid is no longer necessary after a few years. The big question is, is this happening with the Millennium Villages? It’s a question succinctly put by Simon Bland, head of the UK Department for International Development in Kenya, in the recent Vanity Fair article on Sachs:

“I know that if you spend enough money on each person in a village you will change their lives. If you put in enough resources—enough foreigners, technical assistance, and money—lives change. We know that. I’ve been doing it for years… the problem is, when you walk away, what happens?”

As Sachs described in his book, the theory is that, with the right interventions, villages can break the “poverty trap” and begin trading and investing, enabling them to sustain growth without aid. As the Millennium Promise website puts it:

By investing in health, food production, education, access to clean water, and essential infrastructure, these community-led interventions will enable impoverished villages to escape extreme poverty once and for all. Once these communities get a foothold on the bottom rung of the development ladder they can propel themselves on a path of self-sustaining economic growth.

But how likely is this? After all, it’s one thing for Sachs to call for the scaling-up of the project to 100,000 villages if it’s a five-year commitment. But if there is no end in sight to the need for aid, that’s a very different proposition. Next time, we’ll look at the critics who say there’s little chance of the project helping villages self-sustaining. We’ll also look at some of the other criticisms of the project.

* The project expanded to 12 villages across the region first, and has recently taken in another 66 villages surrounding the initial 12. The Sauri project, for example, is actually a cluster of 11 separate small villages. The project requires regions to have pre-existing local government, in this case a single Chief and elected councillor. The project aims to cover 1000 villages by 2009, and eventually 100 000 villages.

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