African Development for the Completely Bloody Ignorant

Last time - what seems like months ago, apologies for the delay - we looked at Jeffrey Sachs‘ Millennium Villages, a set of 12 village-clusters across Africa where extensive aid is funding targeted packages of interventions in health, education and agriculture. Sachs believes that the programme can see villages progress from heavy reliance on aid to self-reliance, and plans to expand the scheme to 100,000 villages.

And on looking at the figures, they seem a roaring success, with impressive achievements in crop yields and health outcomes. Yet the project has met with strong criticism. One UN official working on the project says it “has made all the classic development mistakes”. Sam Rich, a development consultant, recently published his conclusions on a visit to Sauri, Kenya, the first Millennium Village. He’s impressed by some of what he saw: for example, he notes that the project is extremely well run, compared to many similar projects.

Inside a concrete compound at the headquarters of the Millennium Villages Project, development experts sat at computer monitors in ­glass-­walled offices. As I entered, the receptionist at the front desk was on the phone: “You need notebooks? . . . How many? . . . Three hundred, is that all? Right, I’ll order them for you tomorrow. You’ll get them in a few days.”

I’ve spent the last five years in Africa, where I’ve worked with outfits ranging from big international nongovernmental organizations to tiny ­one-­man-­band agencies, but I’ve never seen an order made as breezily as this. At most NGOs, the procurement even of stationery entails filling out forms in triplicate and long ­delays.

However, there’s also much Rich finds which is worrying - and echoes some of the other criticisms made of the project. “Sachs and others working on the project must acknowledge that they are still learning about Africa,” he concludes. “Sauri is not yet a success.” Let’s run through some of the criticisms of the project expressed by Rich and others.

Top-down versus bottom-up

The Millennium Villages project goes to some lengths to ensure that it’s run with the input of local people. Committees are elected at the start of each to decide on strategy for Agriculture, Health, Energy, Education, Environment, Roads, Welfare and Business, and there’s an additional executive committee. But by its very nature, the project is dependent on outside financing and expertise. As this assessment by the Overseas Development Institute points out,

On the one hand, the MVP acknowledges ownership of the development process as a crucial element of success and villagers are encouraged to engage with the project from the beginning… Yet, on the other hand, the MVP proposes a “proven, integrated package of interventions to help villagers out of extreme poverty.” Hence, despite the rhetoric, the MVP has many of the features of a blueprint approach where activities to be undertaken are already defined with little choice being left to the beneficiaries.”

Rich’s piece does suggest the project’s commitment to local control may be problematic in practice. “The villagers often disappoint their benefactors,” Rich observes. “When project officials want to implement a change, they advise the committees. But the committees sometimes move slowly, because there’s not enough support for a particular proposal either within the committee or in the village as a whole.”

Worryingly, the piece suggests that debate about the methods and aims of the project is being stifled even within the UN and other agencies carrying out the work.

Many UN officials I spoke to criticized the Sauri project, but none would speak openly. It was clear that dissenting voices were not welcomed, as an
­e-­mail I received from one made plain: “Unfortunately I’m already in a lot of trouble for talking about what every good scientist should be talking about. The current environment is one in which scientists can no longer speak openly and expect to keep their jobs.”

How can the project have a full and frank dialogue with local people, if it can’t even have one with itself?

Equally though, there are signs of the opposite problem - of too much local control, or rather, that the influence locals have is affecting the effectiveness of the project. For example, the project started out giving each farmer free fertiliser according to the size of their farm land. After objections from locals, it now gives everyone an equal amount. Sensitive to local concerns, but a much less efficient use of resources.

The problems become more serious when you consider the dysfunctional nature of much African local government. In Sauri, a local journalist claims that the committee elections basically went along tribal lines, with the dominant Kalanya clan winning the lead positions on all committees and running the project in corrupt ways. This is a phenomenon known as “elite capture” - when an elite or dominant group wins control of a valuable resource and doesn’t share it fairly. It applies to things like diamond mines, but equally to aid money. If local politics is broken, it can’t provide a basis for management of the project.

Seeing the villages in context

The villages the MVP works with are severely isolated. To be successful, it’s essential to work outside the villages, too, in improving the wider infrastructure. For example, there’s no point growing lots of food to sell if you can’t get it to market because there’s no roads; and there’s little point in having a god clinic if there’s no decent hospital accessible for more severe problems.

The project aims to work with local and national governments to ensure these elements of the work gets done. But a look at Sauri suggests this isn’t happening. Rich speaks to a local farmer who is also the town clerk of the local seat of government:

He said relations between the local government and project organisers have been strained. “At first, there was no consultation with government. Later, they realized we were a stakeholder and they needed our assistance.” Project leaders initially wanted to build not just a clinic but a hospital in Sauri, before the government pointed out that there was already a hospital just a few kilometres away. The project wanted help from government in electrifying Sauri and grading its roads. Two years on, work has started on the roads, but there is still no connection to the national ­power grid.

Whether it’s the project organisers or the government that is to blame for the apparent breakdown in collaboration, it’s really bad news for the long-term progress of the project.

The policy context

It’s also been pointed out that, by focussing so rigorously on on-the-ground solutions, the project misses policy and macroeconomic (economist-speak for “the big picture”) issues that can be hugely influential over the success of the villages. For example, a project official in Rich’s article argues that

the project could be more effective if it pushed for some macroeconomic changes, rather than concentrate all its efforts in the village. For instance, farmers in Kenya don’t buy fertilizer because it costs three times as much as it does in Europe, he said. If the Kenyan government eased taxes and import duties on fertilizer, “a lot more farmers would buy it.”

Strains of expansion

Central to the project is the idea that it can be quickly “scaled-up” across Africa and other poor areas. As long as the funding can be put in place, Sachs argues, there’s no real limit to the potential of the MVP in rural areas. The interventions the projects make “can be expanded quickly to national level,” says Sachs. “But the scale-up remains fragile because of the limited and unpredictable flows of donor aid.”

But, critics argue, there are many other obstacles to scale-up than simply funding. Firstly, there are logistical problems, most notably of personnel. You can build all the clinics you want but if there aren’t enough doctors in the country to man them, what good does it do? Not just local but national-level government investment is also needed for training. There are also concerns over the impact of the level of aid scaling-up would require. The ODI paper notes that “large increases in aid inflows can provoke significant macroeconomic imbalances and undermine the governments’ incentives to build a strong and sustainable tax base.” That’s economist-speak for “increasing aid too much, too fast, can bugger up an economy.”

A more serious problem, though, is that some observers believe the entire basis of the MVP’s development plan is incompatible with scale-up to national level. As we’ve seen, the MVP focuses on agricultural outputs as its main plan for economic growth. Having developed the means to grow more crops than they need, the plan goes, the villages can begin to store it and sell it at market. This brings in money which can be invested in further improvements. This is vital to the villages’ ability to eventually get off aid, out of their “poverty trap”, and onto what Sachs likes to call “the ladder of economic growth”.

The problem, many economists argue, is that not everyone can grow maize for sale, or prices will plummet. This has happened before, as the ODI piece outlines:

As agricultural growth moves to a larger scale, the Sasakawa-Global 2000 project in Ethiopia demonstrates how vital functioning markets and transport infrastructure are. This project, with substantial donor and national support – including from the Prime Minister – promoted a package of improved seeds, fertilisers and improved crop and land management practices, and has led to considerable increases in yields. These increases were welcomed given the declining land fertility and land availability. However, bumper crops in some areas of Ethiopia in 1999 to 2001 flooded local markets and surplus maize was not traded because in many areas transport and market infrastructure were not available. Prices fell by half, and farmers were often left poorer than before.

Maize prices around Sauri, the Rich article notes, have already started to drop. In part, this reinforces the importance of transport and storage infrastructure. If crops can be sold al over the country, they’re less likely to flood local markets. But once you’re fully scaled-up, national and even regional prices could be affected. We’ve seen a similar problem in coffee-producing countries, where are more and more communities in more countries have been encouraged to shift to the crop, prices have gone through the floor.

Sustainability

Above all, observers feel the project hasn’t yet outlined the central part of its plan: the transition from aid dependence to independence. Each village project is supposed to last five years, implying that the village should be largely independent of external support by the end of that period. But looking at Sauri, it’s clear that independence in some areas is a long way off - for example, health:

The clinic has transformed health care: The incidence of malaria has decreased, family planning has increased, and soon anti-retroviral treatments will be available to people with HIV and AIDS. But when the project ends, the funds for the clinic and the doctor, the mosquito nets, and the anti-retrovirals will dry up. In three years, the Kenyan government will face the difficult choice between continuing to fund one model clinic in Sauri or cutting the budget considerably. (Rich’s article)

I’ve always assumed “aid dependency” is mostly a spectre conjured up by right-wing economists, but concern over this seems really widespread. In the recent Vanity Fair article on the villages, a senior British development worker notes:

“I want to say, ‘What concept are you trying to prove?’ Because 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. I’ve lived and worked on and managed [development] projects. The problem is, when you walk away, what happens?”

Even the villagers themselves in Sauri seem worried about it.

While life had improved in the years since the Millennium Village experiment began, Bunde wondered fearfully what will happen when the project ends, “because we have become so dependent.” (Rich)

Sachs’ response - or not

So there you have it. Some fairly weighty criticisms. Sachs has put out various arguments in favour of the project, but hasn’t (as far as I know) specifically responded to Rich’s piece and the other criticisms. When asked about the villages he tends to just say how well things are going. But from my reading so far I can tell some of the criticisms are more valid and serious than others. So next time, I’ll run through the criticisms and analyse them a little more.