Earlier

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.

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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.

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The report of the Commission for Africa, summarised here and more heavily here, is an ambitious and sophisticated analysis of the problems plaguing Africa and the steps needed to solve them. But it isn’t without critics. Last time, I looked at those who criticised the Commission for being too conservative in its calls for Western action and in its criticisms of the role of rich countries and corporations in Africa. This time, let’s look at the other side: those who criticise the report for going too far in those same directions. You could call this the “right-wing” criticism, because its central point is that the Commission doesn’t put enough faith in markets. This is the view of a large number mainstream economists.

This is trickier because, for some reason that I’m not sure of, these criticisms tend not to be about the Commission specifically, but more generally about the whole Live8 / Make Poverty History poverty imbroglio (or, to give it its proper name, the Global Call To Action Against Poverty. Take this article in business newspaper, um, The Business. It encapsulates most of the key pro-market criticisms of the Commission. But it actually reserves its criticisms mostly for Live8 and the Make Poverty History campaign (indeed, the article actually praises the Commission for some of its comments about trade barriers). So I’ll introduce these ideas here, but only briefly. Once we’ve finished laying out The Main Proposals, we’ll be looking at the criticisms in more detail.

There are three main problems, this view argues, with the Africa Commission’s proposals and others like them:

1. Insufficient faith in markets. To left-wing critics, the Africa Commission’s report promotes “a model of development ‘favourable to deregulated free markets and Western economic and political interests.’” To more right-wing critics, however, the opposite is the case. While they welcome the commission’s calls for reductions in trade barriers within Africa, and on the part of rich countries, they call for a host of more radical pro-business reforms, such as abolishing communal land tenure arrangements.
2. Excessive faith in African governments. The Africa recognises corruption and poor governance as obstacles to development, but is broadly optimistic about the prospects for tackling them, with support and training from rich countries. It puts significant faith in NEPAD’s Peer Review Mechanism, and expresses confidence that a new generation of African leaders is more committed to democracy and transparency than its predecessors. To these critics, however, most African states remain profoundly corrupt, incompetent, and an obstacle to growth. Success lies in reducing their power through privatisation of industries and services.

The history of Africa since the 1960s is the history of groups of elites seeking the political kingdom with the primary purpose of enriching themselves, Mbeki says. To rectify this situation, he believes that Africas poorest people must be empowered through the institutions of the free society: property rights and markets.

These two criticisms combine to dispute one of the key demands of the Commission: that rich-country “conditions” on aid, loans and debt relief should be extensively reduced, giving governments more power to control their own economies; and similarly, that free-trade negotiations in organisations like the World Trade Organisation grant African governments the special right to protect their economies with subsidies and trade barriers.

3. Excessive faith in aid. Aid is really the biggest bone of contention for the pro-market critics. They see it as a failure, and as representing an over-reliance on non-market solutions to poverty. Here’s The Business again:

Wearing a white wristband and calling for hand-outs or debt relief is not the answer, says a growing band of young and educated Africans. The money will merely be frittered away, diverted into the Swiss bank accounts of a corrupt ruling class and do little or nothing to bring about prosperity, they say… Poverty in Africa cannot be reduced through government-to-government financial transfers, which never trickle down. This kind of aid perpetuates poverty, promoting poor government policies and corruption, rather than real and lasting economic growth.

Notice how, in the post above, debt relief is seen as pretty much another form of “handout”. This is because, by freeing up resources for governments, the free-market critics believe debt relief fuels corruption and gets salted away just like aid. Indeed, because aid can be given direct to NGOs working on the ground, some even argue debt relief is worse.

I’m not even going to begin delving into this one now, as it will be explored in detail soon. The debate over aid tends to become the flashpoint between the economics mainstream and campaigners. If you want to get ahead on the case against aid, the man to read is William Easterley, a former World Bank economist who’s led the assault on aid in the media. A decent place to start is this record of an event for the launch of his latest book, with downloadable audio of his presentation. For an opposing view, this post in the excellent blog Our Word Is Our Weapon, which tends to support aid, disputes some of the points made in the Business article. Also, have a look at my del.icio.us bookmarks about aid, arguments for it, criticisms of it, and discussions about it.

Before we leave the Africa Commission Report alone (sob!), there’s a little more to be said on a theme I introduced last time, of criticisms of the Commissioners themselves. This, again, is primarily a habit of those accusing the Commission of being too free-market, or to put it another way, “a web of bankers, industrialists and political leaders… all committed to spreading the gospel of free market capitalism.” But it isn’t just the business backgrounds of the Commissioners that has attracted criticism. Meles Zenawi, the Ethiopian Prime Minister who was probably the Commission’s most high-profile member, was once touted as one of the new generation of democratic leaders who would help turn around Africa’s fortunes. But following a disputed election in 2005, Zenawi allowed police to arrest hundreds of protestors, and shoot some, prompting widespread international criticism. Zenawi’s recent intervention in the civil war in Somalia has also proven controversial.

Right, that’s it on the Commission for now. But most of its proposals, and the criticisms of it, will be discussed again when we put together our summary of the main proposals for ending Africa’s poverty troubles. First, back to unfinished business: Jeffrey Sachs.

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Criticisms of the Commission break down into two categories, which can be oversimplified as: suggestions that the Commission is too generous to Africa, and suggestions that it is not generous enough. You could call one set of criticisms essentially “left-wing” and one “right-wing,” but that would be more of an oversimplification still. What would be fairer is to say that one set of criticisms come primarily from more radical campaign groups, particularly smaller grassroots groups; and the other comes primarily from mainstream and conservative economists.

The nub of the first viewpoint is that the Commission is not radical enough in its goals or its proposals. Specifically, there’s a widespread complaint that the Commission should have spoken out more against the free-market policies that African governments have adopted in the last twenty years, largely at the behest of Western donors and the IMF and World Bank. This article by a Ghanaian journalist is a fine example, as is this article by Britain’s George Monbiot. Here’s the Ghanaian, Yao Graham:

True, some of the commission’s proposals are welcome: an extra $25bn year into the continent by 2010 (and a further $25bn by 2015); full debt cancellation for the poorest countries; and the end of rich country export subsidies in cotton, sugar and agriculture. But predictably, there’s a rather large catch. To qualify, Africa is asked to embrace what is called ‘good governance’, an innocent-sounding term hiding a free market agenda that puts the freedom of firms before the strengthening of citizenship and the rights of people.

As examples of the Commission’s “free market agenda”, Graham points out the lack of complaint in the report about environmental devastation and human rights abuses in the Niger Delta, or the privatisation of vital services like water. Both of these are examples of actions taken by private companies, often with the support of aid donor governments, which many African and foreign NGOs are opposed to. Monbiot develops the theme, though he’s not just talking about the Commission specifically.

I think Graham’s statement that the “good governance” talked about in the Commission’s report is primarily about free market access is simply inaccurate. The focus of the report’s discussions of governance is on corruption. But the wider comment, that the Report offers no serious restriction on the role of foreign private companies in Africa, is accurate. And it’s certainly true that both the Commission and the general tone of the mainstream debate about Africa tends to assume that, as Monbiot puts it, “Multinational corporations… are not the cause of Africa’s problems, but the solution”. But it’s not fair to suggest the Africa Commission is actively pushing free markets on African leaders. In fact, it specifically speaks out against policy conditions on aid and loans, the main way in which free-market policies have been pushed on African countries in the past.

A wider question that this opens up, though, is whether all this free marketing is actually a bad idea, as Graham and Monbiot state it is. It’s not something I want to get into now, but we’ll look at it more in future. There are certainly some horrible things in the recent history of Africa attributable to multinational companies, and some happening now. But it’s also hard to see a development path for Africa that doesn’t involve foreign investment.

If you want to think about it some more right now, this report includes several examples of this school of criticism.

Interstingly, this viewpoint tends to extend into criticism of the Commissioners themselves.It’s said that the Commission’s selection has a political bias, consisting mostly of those with an established commitment to free-market solutions to Africa’s problems: that, as this article puts it, they were “selected according to their ‘modernising’ credentials rather than their expertise.” This article introduces the Commissioners, calling them “A web of bankers, industrialists and political leaders with connections to the IMF and the World Bank, all committed to spreading the gospel of free market capitalism.”

It is, of course, unlikely that Blair would ever have put anyone on the Commission (and he did select it himself, or at least, his office did) who was going to severely criticise policies that the UK has been committed to for years. But to criticise the Commissioners for “links to the World Bank” seems a bit rich, given that it is, for all the criticisms of it, the world’s leading development institution. And to criticise Benjamin Mkapa, and Meles Zenawi, the leaders of Tanzania and Ethiopia, for steering their countries “directly into the arms of the IMF and World Bank” also seems slightly unreasonable: there is hardly any real aternative for a country dependent on aid and loans from those institutions for survival. My favourite is the criticism of activist Anna Tibaijuka, who “combines an active role in Tanzanian civil society forums with directorships in private companies dedicated to encouraging entrepreneurship and efficiency in the marketing of agricultural commodities.” Entrepeneurship and efficiency! Are they really saying these are the enemy?

I suppose what I’m saying is that the nine Africans on the Commission seem, to me, to be reasonably representative of mainstream educated African thought. The views the critics would have liked to see represented are perfectly valid, but they are quite radical, and, I think, rare amongst elected African leaders right now. But I don’t know this for certain.

That is a brief summary of the, for want of a better term, “left-wing” criticisms of the Africa Commission. I hope I haven’t been too biased in my description. The core issue - the place of free trade in Africa’s future - is something I’ll look at properly soon. Next, we’ll look at the other side of the coin - the “right-wing” critique.

UPDATE 05/06/07: Another left-wing critique.

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