UGANDA - "Currently, more than 8,000,000 people around the world die each year because they are too poor to stay alive. Our generation can choose to end that extreme poverty by the year 2025."
It sounds awfully ambitious, but this is what economist and former World Bank President Jeffrey Sachs claims. His basic premise is that with enough money, we can solve any development problems. In his visit to Duke and UNC this week, Sachs will promote the Millennium Village Project, his new idea of "sponsoring villages." He claims that five years of financial giving and interventions from Western scientists can solve all ills in third-world villages.
I deeply respect Sachs's optimism, but when something sounds too good to be true, it likely is. The problems of African development run far deeper than a shortage of dollars. A capital injection is not the answer for sustainable development.
Recent publicity has trumpeted the seemingly instant successes in test villages; in an interview with CNN, the Millennium Village Project coordinator in Ethiopia kept insisting, "It's not difficult."
Decades of history tell us that she is wrong. Buying a truck for a village is great at first, but when the truck breaks down, what happens? Increasing farmers' yields is super, but where will they sell the new produce? Building a health clinic is fabulous, but who then supplies the drugs and trained doctors after the construction project ends? A project may be ambitious enough to bring electricity to villages, but who then will pay for the power?
The structural issues run even deeper. How will any of the changes stop the corrupt officials blocking the flow of money to villages? Whom do you pay so that women are not treated like property? How much does it cost to give the poorest of the poor a voice in local government, let alone national politics?
Before we run in to give money, it is important to take time to find these structural roots to third-world problems.
My fieldwork in Uganda this semester has been focused on the social networks of rural villagers. The first night I stayed in a tiny, poor, remote village near the Kenya-Uganda border, a pack of children gathered with candles around my mat, peering to see how the white boy slept.
I thought they were just as unusual. The father I stayed with had five wives and a whole horde of small, naked, dirty children. I cannot imagine being a woman in the village setting with almost no rights but limitless responsibilities.
The village had no electricity, running water or even real roads, and the local clinic went weeks without drugs.
As I spoke with the villagers, I heard a lot about problems, but whenever I asked what the solutions could be, the answers involved outsiders donating money. There was so little initiative from locals to think of their own solutions. They feel isolated and disempowered, forgotten by the national government and powerless to change their situation.
The biggest problem with the Millennium Village idea is that it does so little to empower the local people. The project actually encourages the crippling dependency that plagues so many African villages, instilling the idea that only outsiders can solve problems.
There is a lot of talk of villagers owning the projects, but allowing them to help plan how to spend outside money is a far cry from fostering the skills to solve problems internally. Five years down the road, they likely still will not have built the social capital to work together, stand up for their rights and pool resources with neighboring villages. The foreigners will leave, and the troubles will gradually reappear.
In her CNN interview, the Millennium Village coordinator in Ethiopia assigned to "set out the priorities for the village" said, "It's the core money that is needed to bring in all the pieces that will change their world."
This could not be further from the truth.
Outside money is still necessary to bring the clinics, schools and electricity, but money alone is not enough. Development will never happen unless we start at the very grassroots level, building and using the resources of the "poorest of the poor" and then empowering villages to find their own solutions to "change their world."
I am certainly not trying to say development is hopeless, and I do not even want to discourage donations to Sachs's project; the awareness he has built is phenomenal.
But a "five-year plan" will not magically cure centuries of isolation and disempowerment. If we are not realistic, we will do far more harm than good.
David Fiocco is a Trinity junior studying abroad in Uganda this semester. His column runs every other Tuesday.
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