In dozens of “model” villages across Africa, the United Nations and the Earth Institute are showing that with relatively small investments and simple interventions, people in Africa do not have to die of poverty anymore.
 | Since 2004, maize production has tripled in Sauri, while malaria prevalence has dropped from 55 to 13 percent. (Photo: Pedro Sanchez / Earth Institute) |
Sauri has changed, no doubt about it. It has just been three years since the little village close to Lake Victoria in Kenya became the first UN Millennium Village in 2004. Now its inhabitants are harvesting more food, more kids are going to school, and less people are dying of malaria.
If not for the UN program, Sauri would probably still look like many other rural villages in sub-Saharan Africa: malnourished with poor health services, low school attendance, and high rates of malaria and AIDS infection. Like over 300 million people in Africa, Sauri's 5,000 inhabitants were living on less than one dollar a day.
Sauri has become a large-scale experiment - a playground for economists and development experts like Jeffrey Sachs who are trying to demonstrate how the Millennium Development Goals can be achieved. These eight goals, set in 2000 by the UN, aim to halve the number of people living below the poverty line, promote gender equality and universal primary education, and other basic improvements by 2015.
 | School lunches are helping to boost primary school enrollment and attendance in Sauri. (Photo: Pedro Sanchez / Earth Institute) |
UN Secretary General Ban ki-moon recently warned the world that we could fail to meet these commitments. The Millennium Villages, however, stand out as promising examples of what could be. Sauri has turned into a blueprint for local development that has already been implemented in almost 80 villages in ten African countries.
Experts like John McArthur of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, one of the organizations spearheading the project, believe that the fight against poverty has to be won in rural villages. Underserved by medical services and infrastructure, they are the hotspots of hunger and disease. McArthur says that once resources go to basic investments on the ground - not rich country consultants or workshops - development is inevitable.
Beyond big money
The old strategy of helping people help themselves seems to work. Once communities are designated as Millennium Villages, community members become involved with identifying needs and enacting solutions. The aim is to establish community-led initiatives that improve food production and fight malnutrition, low school attendance, water shortages, and malaria. In the long-run, villages should evolve from subsistence farming to self-sustained economic activities. UN teams - mostly Kenyans in the case of Sauri and the surrounding villages - simply introduce technology and techniques, and provide on-site training.
It is not only about big money. Being chosen as a Millennium Village does amount to some 250,000 dollars of subsidies per village each year, around 50 dollars per villager. Even more money, another 60 dollars on average, stems from local and national governments, corporations, NGOs, and members of the villages themselves. That is 110 dollars per villager per year - less than half a dollar a day, but effective if used the right way.
No rocket science
In the prototype Millennium Village, Sauri, maize production has tripled, lunches are provided to over 17,000 students, and malaria prevalence has dropped from 55 to 13 percent - all since 2004. The "interventions" to achieve such success have often been surprisingly affordable and simple.
"In the Millennium Villages, there's no rocket science," says John McArthur. "It's fertilizer, feeds, bed nets, water points, school meals. Each of those things is crucial. None is sufficient, but together they are a very powerful, integrated package."
"That's the whole point of the [Millennium Development] Goals," adds McArthur. "We're not doing education versus health, or education versus water, because each of those are mutually essential and reinforcing. Otherwise, it's like asking ‘do I want to live off my liver or my lungs today?'"
Insecticide-treated bed nets have cut down on malaria. A clinic has improved local health. Fertilizer and stronger seeds have boosted crop yields. In addition to such proven solutions, the Millennium Villages also act as testing grounds for new ideas like rainwater harvesting, microcredit, nursery schools, and efficient and low-cost LED lighting.
Model settlements?
The question is whether the successes of Sauri and other Millennium Villages be repeated elsewhere in Africa. And what happens to Sauri once investment and support from the UN, foreign governments and philanthropists slow down? For development consultant Sam Rich, Sauri is "not yet a success."
"Instead, Sauri remains Africa in microcosm. All the fundamental problems that exist in Africa still exist in Sauri; in some cases, these problems are magnified," writes Rich in an article in the Wilson Quarterly. Sauri, he states, is still prone to conflicts in local governance, corruption, bad infrastructure, gender barriers, and other social divisions.
John McArthur, however, sees the Millennium Villages as practical, ground-level initiatives that have demonstrated progress and "the kind of success that is possible." A 50-dollar annual investment per person, he says, is "well-within" the commitment made by the Group of Eight (G8) at Gleneagles in 2005. The leaders promised 50 billion dollars of development assistance per year to Africa - about 55 dollars for every one of the continent's more than 900 million inhabitants.
editor: Valdis Wish
publishing date: July 9, 2007
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