[bestbits] FW: An Interesting Review of A Book on Jeff Sachs and the Millennium Villages--Re: WSIS +10

[michael gurstein]

I think that there may be an interest in the below on this list since its
subject, Jeffrey Sachs was the keynote speaker at the WSIS + 10 Review in
February and is evidently the senior advisor to the UN on the update of the
Millennium Development goals.  

 

There is currently a lively discussion on this subject on the main Community
Informatics elist <http://vancouvercommunity.net/lists/info/ciresearchers>
where a variety of grizzled and highly experienced on the ground ICT for
Development practitioners are chiming in to add their own criticisms to Mr.
Sachs` approach to Development, the use of ICTs and his gold plated (million
dollar--evidently failing) Millennium Villages. (And as it happens this
reinforces the need for some serious examination of the realities of results
on the ground of ICT4D as an input into WSIS +10.)

 

M

 

-----Original Message-----
From: michael gurstein [mailto:gurstein at gmail.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, November 20, 2013 12:44 PM
To: ciresearchers at vancouvercommunity.net
Subject: An Interesting Review of A Book on Jeff Sachs and the Millennium
Villages

 

 <http://www.mcleodgroup.ca/2013/11/19/idealism-and-hubris/>
http://www.mcleodgroup.ca/2013/11/19/idealism-and-hubris/

 

IDEALISM AND HUBRIS

 

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 pla

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