Jeffrey Sachs and the great Ugandan donkey fiasco

Jeffrey Sachs had a Big Idea: to eradicate extreme poverty in Africa -- maybe the entire world -- by 2011, or maybe sooner. And why not? After all, the self-celebrated Dr. Sachs had already single-handedly salvaged the economies of Bolivia, Poland and even Russia. (Well, maybe not Russia, so much.)

In his influential bestseller The End of Poverty, he posits that poverty is simply an economic problem that can be solved. So, with single-minded determination, he set out to put his theories into practice, to prove that the world's most destitute people could be lifted onto "the ladder of development".

The proving ground that he chose was Africa, site of most of the world's truly wretched countries. Wisely, he didn't attempt to develop and enrich the whole of the Dark Continent at once. Rather, he launched the Millennium Villages Project, a five-year experiment in bringing progress and prosperity to a handful of impoverished rural communities.

One of the villages selected was Ruhiira, a flyspeck in southwestern Uganda, very near the Heart of Darkness. To organize and manage the Ruhiira operation, Dr. Sachs chose David Siriri, a man of good intentions and credentials -- a Ph.D. in forestry and agronomics, a local person who knew the language and the people.

The team of geniuses working with Dr. Sachs in New York made a plan for Mr. Siriri to follow. What they must do, he was told, is move from the subsistence farming of matoke (bananas) to the commercial farming of crops which could be sold elsewhere in Uganda, or even exported. Cash crops like ginger, cardamom and pineapples. Seriously.

Mr. Siriri told the folks in New York that the proposed crops needed water...lots of water. Ruhiira does have a water source, down in the valley. Unfortunately, the community's shambas (small farms) are on a ridge...about 1000 feet higher.

But Sachs had an answer. (He had an answer for everything!) The good doctor convinced JM Eagle, the world's largest manufacturer of plastic pipes, to donate $150,000 worth of PVC pipes to Ruhiira. They were ready to be shipped, and would be, once someone figured out who was going to pay the $120,000 needed to get them from the USA to rural Uganda.

Of course the pipes would still need to be installed. Unfortunately the Eagle pipes were manufactured to American standards, with American fittings, whereas Uganda uses British standards.

While the boys in New York were wrestling with this problem, the chief of the MVP funding arm came up with his own brilliant solution. Donkeys! Yes!! "Did you know that just four donkeys can carry eight hundred litres at a time?", the NY pointdexter asked Siriri. "We could create water-filling stations at the top of the cliffs and have people collect their water there for a small fee. We'll prove that people can make money on their crops even if they have to pay for water."

In short order, eight donkeys arrived in Ruhiira. Within a couple of months, four of them died of exhaustion. The Eagle pipes were eventually shipped, but the boat carrying them was hijacked by pirates in the Indian ocean, off the coast of Kenya.

A few pineapples were grown, but proved too difficult to store and ship. No cardamom or ginger was ever sold. The small farms of Ruhiira are still growing...wait for it...bananas.

The great Ugandan donkey fiasco is just one of the many examples of the folly of trying to solve Africa's problem with Eurocentric ideas and techniques. Dr. Sachs was informed and guided by western economic ideas centred on the concept of "the rational man". This theory presumes that, given two choices, the rational man will choose the better option, regardless of religious and cultural influences. In Africa, that's simply wrong.

In another Millennium Village, in Dertu (in northeastern Kenya, near the border with Somalia), the local people -- mostly ethnic Somalis, thus Muslim -- refused to build a clinic because, they said, descendants of Ibrahim (Abraham) do not do manual labour. Instead, MVP funds were used to hire ethnic Bantu (black) labourers to do the work while the Somalis sat around and chewed qat.

These stories, and many more, are to be found in The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty, by Nina Munk (Signal/M&S 2013). Walt recomments it highly!

With the co-operation of Dr. Sachs -- let's be fair about this -- Ms Munk spent six years reporting on the Millennium Villages Project.
She shadowed Sachs on his trips to Africa, sat in on conversations with heads of state, and interviewed scores of people involved, from high officials right down to illiterate inhabitants of Ruhiira and Dertu. Here's a quote from the second-last paragraph of the book:

"In the beginning, Jeffrey Sachs had set out on a question to validate his scientific approach to ending poverty. He'd used the Millennium Villages Project as a laboratory to test his theories and to prove that his series of 'interventions' could transform the lives of the world's poorest people. He'd spent more than $120 million on his experiment.

"For all that, however, he had misjudged the complex, shifting reality in the villages. Africa is not a laboratory: Africa is chaotic and messy and unpredictable." [My emphasis.]

Walt can add only that the failure -- for that's what it was -- of the MVP experiment is a classic example of "MAWA" -- the short epitaph beloved of old Africa hands: Mother Africa Wins Again.

Further reading on WWW:
"Have you given yet to help Somalia? Don't! "
"Biggest ratholes named and shamed"
"Coming soon - another 'nation' to help"
And there's much, much more! Use the search tool to check the posts with the "foreign aid" tag. And remember...you can't help those who won't help themselves!