African Development for the Completely Bloody Ignorant

Earlier, we looked at some of the criticisms of Jeffrey Sachs‘ Millennium Villages Project. Now, let’s see if they stand up. If you haven’t read the first post, do so first or this won’t make much sense. Or read our intro to the project. Jeffrey Sachs hasn’t, to my knowledge, published a detailed rebuttal of the criticisms, so this is me with my thinking cap on. Disagreements, ripostes, additional resources etc. are very much welcomed.

Local input.

It seems like the project is stuck between a rock and a hard place here. On the one hand, it has been criticised for insufficient attention to the views of local people. On the other hand, it’s been pointed out that allowing elected committees to manage the project runs the risk of corruption and division along clan lines. Indeed, a recent article manages to criticise the project from both these angles at the same time! The truth is that all on-the-ground development work walks a tightrope when it comes to local input. Often, local customs or habits - such as the denial of full benefits to women, for example - are part of what needs to be overturned for success. By having formally elected committees, the MVP has a level of local input that is, I think, unusual. The fact that, for the most part, the problems of tribalism described in the article haven’t derailed the project entirely may suggest they’re getting the balance right. If, for example, they’d tried to prevent villagers simply voting along clan lines, how could they have avoided legitimate charges of colonialism?

What’s much more concerning is the suggestion that people both in the village and in the UN are afraid to criticise the project: the villagers for fear that it will be cancelled, and the staff that they’ll be removed from it. Given the experimental nature of the project, an atmosphere of free discussion is surely essential. The villagers need to be reassured that the project will be continued to completion whatever happens, and actively encouraged to report problems to the project staff - who must be encouraged to listen, of course. And in the UN, too, if there is a climate of fear, a more open atmosphere must be created urgently. It’s possible such problems stem direct from Sachs’ personality - he’s described as a bully in the recent Vanity Fair article, and occasionally during his BBC Reith Lectures recently he betrayed a slight tendency to be dismissive with critics. Also, the project was personally supported by Kofi Annan and is still supported, as far as I know, at high levels within the UN - and scandals such as the Iraq oil-for-food program and allegations of sexual abuse by peacekeepers have suggested the UN’s internal transparency is poor. The project managers must have the authority to get on with the project, but debate should surely be encouraged.

I know this site has some readers who have spent or are spending time in Africa working in the field on development projects. Your thoughts on this issue - on how the balance should be struck, and whether Sachs’ project seems to be getting it right - would be very welcome.

District level

The project works in clusters of villages, but needs support from local government at district level to really work - only they can do things like improve roads. This support has been slow in coming, it seems, in some areas. It’s hard to know what to say about this - there’s clearly a problem, but it doesn’t seem entirely fair to blame the project, assuming they’ve been doing everything they can to negotiate with governments. In the first year or so the project may have been dismissive to or ignored local government, as suggested in the Rich article; the article suggests that relationships have now been forged, so hopefully the pace of district development will increase.

Perhaps this a problem that will reduce as the project is scaled-up to more villages. I can imagine it being hard for the local representative of a Millennium Villages area to convince the national government that because they’re already receiving thousands of donor dollars, they must also jump to the front of the queue for new roads and hospitals. Once the project spreads, it won’t seem as inequitable to invest in infrastructure in project areas. Then, of course, it all still has to be paid for.

Scaling-up problems

To be fair to the project, its plans to scale itself up to 100,000 villages doesn’t mean just replicating the project repeatedly. The idea is to build outwards from core villages in growing clusters, with district-level investment part of the process. Nevertheless, there are serious logistical obstacles, such as a lack of skilled personnel, to scaling-up.

What this boils down to is a key limitation of the project: the village-level investments are designed to fit within a framework of general aid-financed investment across countries, as laid out in Sach’s The End of Poverty and the UN Millennium Development Report. But right now, the investments are taking place outside of that framework. The extra aid money agreed to finance the plans at Gleneagles in 2005 hasn’t appeared; countries can’t afford to train more doctors, any more than they can to build roads.

A similar point applies to the argument that large-scale aid increases can destabilise government or the economy. Sachs’ plan - as well as related schemes such as the recommendations of the Commission for Africa - contains some measures to ensure aid increases aren’t disruptive, including a “public management plan” for each country to plot the upgrade of government capacity to match the new funding. These measures, Sachs argues, “would put to rest the current favourite explanation of donors for not doing more to help the poorest countries: the alleged lack of ‘absorptive capacity’ to use more aid.” (The End of Poverty, p274) The problem is that, while the MVP is often judged as a project on its own, successful scaling-up depends on this broader framework of investment and reform. Sachs can hardly be accused of ignoring these aspects: he’s been loudly calling for them for several years. To push ahead with scaling-up without these things in place, however, might be reckless.

The other problem of scaling-up is that of plummeting agricultural prices. What this boils down to is the question: if everyone in the countryside grows crops for sale, who on earth will buy them? I haven’t read up on it in detail, but I assume the answer must be, in the first instance, the people in the cities - an ever-growing proportion of the African population. Then, second, other countries through export. There’s no doubt that increased agricultural production can be an incredibly powerful force for economic growth - Sachs likes to cite the “green revolution” in Asia, when new crop varieties created huge increases in yields, as the obvious example.But several obstacles exist which must be overcome for the strategy to work, all of which lie outside the direct influence of the MVP. First, as previously noted, you need roads and a truck to get goods to market. You also need information on what price you should accept, so as not to fall victim to unscrupulous traders, and internet access is a big part of the story here - again something which the MVP aims to provide, but for which it needs infrastructure support.

Even more difficult, when it comes to exports you need improvement of the existing trade rules and tarriffs, which are stacked against exports from most developing countries. Without these measures, it seems entirely feasible (though I don’t know it in detail) that the benefits of increased production could be severely hampered by decreasing prices.

But there is one step that can be quickly taken to minimise the problem - diversification. This means growing more than one crop. The MVP in Kenya has so far focussed on maize, and one worker in the Rich article calls this short-sighted, saying,

Growing only maize year after year depletes the soil. It’s also a ­high-­risk strategy, he said, as the entire crop may fail… Maize is a subsistence crop that has fed Sauri families for years, but, he contended, its price is too low to make it a cash crop. He is trying to push the project to spend more time touting vegetable crops that fetch good prices at market, such as onions, tomatoes, and ­cabbages.

The project is still in the subsistence phase and as it moves more into the sale phase, it seems likely that it will encourage diversification. Sachs clearly states that diversification is part of the plan.

Sustainability

The final and in many ways most fundamental criticism of the project is that it’s not yet clear that the project is on track to take the villages to independence - to end their dependence on aid. This is in part the result of many of the other aspects described above - independence depends on access to markets, for example, which relates to the trade reforms already discussed. But it’s also more essentially true that the transition from aid dependence to independence has been described by Sachs only in the broadest terms, and when their sustainability is questioned, Sachs ignores the issue completely and just focuses on agricultural and health targets. Three years into the five-year project in Sauri, Kenya, there’s no clear sign of aid dependency decreasing.

But here’s the thing: if Sachs were completely honest, I think he’d admit the five-year duration of each Millennium Villages intervention is, basically, a fantasy. The plans described in The End of Poverty talk about the elimination of extreme poverty as a twenty-year project, with a substantial part of the battle to be won by 2015, in line with the Millennium Development Goals. Nowhere that I recall in The End of Poverty does Sachs talk about serious lasting changes being made in just five years. For example, discussing the free distribution of fertiliser to Sauri, Sachs talks about independence in a ten-year timescale.

In the first few years, fertilisers and and improved fallows should be given largely for free to the villagers to boost their own nutrition and health, and to build a small financial cushion. Later on it will be possible to share the costs with the community and, eventually, perhaps in a decade, to provide the fertiliser and improved fallows on a full commercial basis. (The End of Poverty, p236. My italics)

Indeed, the FAQ page of the MVP website makes clear that five years of investment isn’t enough.

A central proposition underpinning the Millennium Villages concept therefore is that operational sustainability can be achieved in each village before the 2015 MDG deadline, although many villages will still require ongoing but generally declining financial support beyond then. For these villages, it will be crucial that existing ODA commitments for 2010 and 2015 are met and maintained until the respective developing countries graduate from the need for external support.

Five years was never intended to be enough.

I don’t, bluntly, think Sachs has been entirely honest in this. Elsewhere on the site, it’s clearly implied that five years is sufficient to reach sustainability: “each Millennium Village requires a donor investment of $300,000 per year for five years,” says the sustainability page cheerfully with no mention of further investment.

What to make of this? It seems to me that, in order to get the project off the ground, Sachs made a colossal gamble: to ask for five-year funding, knowing full well the transition from dependence to self-sufficiency couldn’t be made in that time. The results of the project would be so impressive, he must have reasoned, that donors would be willing to stump up for another five years, making sustainability a real possibility. Gradually as the five-year point approaches, he’ll place the villages more and more in a longer-term narrative, ending in 2015 with the MDGs or in 2025, and secure extended funding.

Whether you think this sleight-of-hand is honourable I’ll leave up to you. But I think it’s indicative of a wider truth: to judge the MVP as a complete project, in its current form, is in some ways to miss the point. Though Sachs is no doubt passionate about the project, it clearly exists primarily to prove the effectiveness of the interventions he proposes, and therefore to build support for his grander scheme. The MVP site repeatedly points out that the MVP fit nicely into the wider context of the 2005 Gleneagles aid commitments, designed for the kind of wider-scale intervention he proposes.

I don’t mean this to sound Machiavellian - I simply think the project has to be seen in this context. Sachs’ end game, after all, is the elimination of extreme poverty! There’s no serious prospect of the MVP process, with its existing funding structure, expanding across the very whole of Africa and elsewhere and reaching every village mired in extreme poverty. To do that would require a whole new model - extensive schemes managed by governments, and supported by massive aid from rich countries, co-ordinated by a multilateral body such as the UN. Which is, of course, exactly what Sachs proposes!

A similar response applies to the criticism that the project ignores policy issues that affect the poor. In one way, it seems like criticising a chair for not making the tea. The project is designed to show that on-the-ground interventions can transform lives; policy issues are obviously important but they come under a different header. The Sachs grand plan does address such issues (whether satisfactorily I don’t know yet), and the MVP makes a lot more sense when seen in this context.

The MVP in context

That is, I suspect, what’s really going on, and might explain Sachs’ not having given a detailed plan for the transition to sustainability for the existing MVP villages. Under Sachs’ plan, Sauri will become independent of aid, around 2015 - but in the context of a wider transition to independence for the whole of Kenya, the result of several years of intense investment in infrastructure, governance and personnel on a national scale.

“Sauri,” argues Rich, “is not yet a success.” But paradoxically, even if Sauri doesn’t meet its targets, it isn’t necessarily a failure. All it and the other existing MVP projects have to do - which is by no means easy - is to achieve good enough results that sceptics of the value of aid-led massive intervention - what Rich dubs “shock aid” - are won over. If by 2010 the rich countries have fulfilled the commitments they made at Gleneagles - to double aid to Africa, and make various other trade and debt reforms - then the MVP will have fulfilled its purpose, and will be rolled into the larger-scale investment schemes the money is intended to fund.

There clearly have been mistakes made in Sauri and the other Millennium Villages, as in any project. The suggestions that the project is brooking no criticism on the ground is especially concerning, But the criticisms that suggest the project is critically flawed may be missing the point - that it isn’t really supposed to work in isolation. Of course, many people think that the whole Sachs plan is, in itself, badly flawed, and so that isn’t going to be any consolation; we’ll look at those criticisms in detail soon.

Speaking of the Big Plan…

That, at least, is my take on it based on what I’ve read so far. Please leave your thoughts below, and also let me know about any further sources you’re aware of on the MVP. Next time, we’ll return to The End of Poverty and lay out in more detail the national- and global-level changes Sachs calls for to make the MDGs - and, ultimately, the end of poverty - achievable.

UPDATE: The Bloody Earth Institute has redesigned their website and lots of links no longer work. I’ll try to edit them all out but apologies if you get 404′d. They’ve also launched something called “Millennium Cities.” I can’t quite bring myself to look into them right now, but I will.