Millennium Villages Archives - Humanosphere

Millennium Villages

Rwandans fight poverty while others fight over the numbers |

Tom Paulson

Donald Ndahiro, team leader of Millennium Villages Project in Rwanda

Editor’s Note: This is the latest in an ongoing series, Metrics Mania, exploring the debates surrounding how to tell if aid and development projects are working. This is a look at one such project at the center of the debate.

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MAYANGE, RWANDA — Many miles south of ‘Hotel Rwanda’ in Kigali is the site of one of the worst massacres of the 1994 Rwandan genocide where the majority Hutu ethnic group sought to eliminate their rivals, the Tutsis.

As one local, Donald Ndahiro, told me during my visit here to the Bugasera District: “This was the place they used to send people to starve and die.”

Ndahiro said this was a terrible place before the genocide — a tsetse-fly infested, hostile land of the extremely poor. And it remained a terrible place after. Only a few years ago, people were still starving — and dying — here in one of Rwanda’s poorest regions. Disease, alcoholism and despair were rampant.

It’s not at all like that today. So what happened?

Tom Paulson

Coffee farming, Bugesera District

One explanation is that a number of aid projects — including the celebrated Millennium Villages and a lesser-known but large-scale health improvement project by the Seattle-based Glaser Progress Foundation — were launched here aimed at correcting decades of neglect and to see if targeted investments could rapidly improve quality of life. Also nearby is another Seattle project, a girl’s school called Gashora Academy.

A competing theory is that the progress here is largely due to Rwanda’s overall economic improvement in the past decade.

These two views provoke fierce argument over whether foreign aid works, or at least how to measure its effectiveness. Metrics mania. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, Politics, Donald Ndahiro, Jeffrey Sachs, Josh Ruxin, millennium development goals, Millennium Villages, Rwanda

June 7, 2012 | 10:40 AM | By Tom Paulson |

METRICS MANIA

Metrics Mania afflicts the fight against poverty |

Flickr, chrisjohnbeckett

Newton, statue outside the British Library

A lot of people who say they want to help poor people — the aid and development community — have been getting really nasty with each other lately. Why? In part, it’s because fighting poverty is messy and hard to measure.

At the center of this nastiness is a well-known economist, Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, who is chronically accused by critics of promoting an anti-poverty strategy – known as the Millennium Villages Project – which they say is unproven.

The criticism flared again recently, prompting reports like this Forbes piece, which contends Jeff Sachs’ Millennium Villages Showing Zero Results

That’s not quite true. The more thoughtful critics don’t actually say Sachs’ approach doesn’t work. They just say it isn’t clear yet if it’s working.

But boy, does this lack of clarity make some folks angry! To wit:

One of Sachs’ leading critics, Michael Clemens at the prestigious Center for Global Development in Washington, DC, recently referred to Sachs on Twitter as “contemptible” for failing to acknowledge his project’s faults in an op-ed he wrote defending the value of foreign aid.
Timothy Ogden, editor-in-chief at Philanthropy Action, replied to Clemens (also on Twitter) that Sachs is to economics what Pat Robertson is to Christianity, which I assume was not meant as a compliment.

I have high regard for both Clemens and Ogden and this was, after all, just Twitter. But such hostility directed at Sachs is not that unusual. And it has gotten so intense lately I started wondering if the intensity is overwhelming the content here.

I’m no aid expert, economist or even really that good at math. I’m just a journalist who covers this stuff. And I do love a good argument. But I’m not so sure this qualifies as a good argument anymore. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, Center for Global Development, development, evaluation, foreign aid, Jeffrey Sachs, metrics, Michael Clemens, Millennium Villages, Philanthropy Action, Timothy Ogden

June 7, 2012 | 10:00 AM | By Tom Paulson |

METRICS MANIA

Q&A with Jeffrey Sachs: Why is everyone so mad at this guy? |

Tom Paulson

Jeffrey Sachs, outside Paramount Theatre on recent visit to Seattle

Well, maybe not everyone.

But the world-renowned economist and director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute certainly has his fair share of angry critics.

Jeffrey Sachs draws fire like few others within the aid and development community. Yet it’s also fair to say he has done as much as anyone to promote the fight against global poverty and injustice.

Before he became known as an anti-poverty warrior, Sachs advised countries in Latin America and Eastern Europe on transitioning to market economies, an experience which led him to a focus on international development in general.

He’s become a vocal advocate of the power we have to end extreme poverty and a critic of the indifference of the rich world to the plight of the poor — or of policy makers who don’t take up the cause.

Sachs is perhaps mostly closely associated with the initiative known as the Millennium Development Goals, an ambitious scheme launched by the United Nations and international community in 2000 that set out eight goals aimed at reducing extreme poverty and global inequity.

To both prove the value of and learn how best to achieve these goals, Sachs launched the Millennium Villages Project (MVP) — a 10-year project based in 14 communities across Africa, involving some 500,000 people given funding to make strategic improvements in certain aspects of health, infrastructure, education and business.

Millennium Villages

It’s an investment of tens of millions of dollars over ten years that tallies out at $120 per person per year – aimed at demonstrating that key changes in health, agriculture, water, roads, education and business development can lift communities out of poverty.

And it is Sachs’ Millennium Villages Project that seems to get people hopping mad.

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, Jeffrey Sachs, metrics, millennium development goals, Millennium Villages

June 7, 2012 | 9:57 AM | By Tom Paulson |

METRICS MANIA

Metrics Mania: Background on the latest Millennium Villages flap |

A quick chronology of the recent flap over Sachs and the Millennium Villages Project (MVP)

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First came this report in The Lancet that reported in MVP communities – Child mortality rapidly declined over three years
The news media, like The Guardian, reports this – Child mortality down by a third in Jeffrey Sachs Millennium Villages
Some, like Christian Science Monitor, raise questions – Just How Effective is the Millennium Villages Project?
More questions, in media such as UN Dispatch – What have we learned from the Millennium Villages Project?
The Lancet issues a correction (retraction of some data) - Errors in Millennium Village report
Aid blogger Roving Bandit isn’t satisfied – The Lancet’s editors don’t get evaluation

The gist of all these stories, blogs and reports is that the claim that child mortality was significantly reduced as a result of the improvements made in the MVP communities could not be isolated from broader improvements seen in the region or nation as a whole. Child mortality did decline significantly. But the critics argued MVP can’t claim credit for this — and were mad it did.

FILED UNDER: Basics, evaluation, metrics, Millennium Villages

October 14, 2011 | 9:14 AM | By Tom Paulson |

The curious case of the Millennium Villages: Arguing why we get better |

How many Americans know and/or care about the “Greatest Promise Ever Made” — the Millennium Development Goals?

I haven’t seen a survey, but I suspect the numbers are low. That’s unfortunate because most economists and foreign policy experts say that reducing global poverty and improving people’s lives makes the world a better, safer, healthier and more prosperous place for all of us.

That’s what the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) aim to achieve by 2015. The MDGs represent the international communities’ basic yardstick for measuring whether things are getting better out there. Whether the MDGs represent the best way to measure things getting better is another issue. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, Center for Global Development, Jeffrey Sachs, Kofi Annan, millennium development goals, Millennium Villages

November 4, 2010 | 11:44 AM | By Tom Paulson |

Why is everyone always picking on Jeff Sachs? |

Okay, that’s not my real question. I think I know why people pick on Jeff Sachs.

Earth Institute

Jeff Sachs

Sachs, an economist and director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, makes bold statements. He criticizes powerful people. He’s in cahoots with the United Nations (I believe he owns a black helicopter). He frequently expresses pure outrage at the indifference shown to problems of global poverty and inequity. Heck, Sachs is influential and outspoken. It’s healthy to push back at such folks.

Lately, the pushback is focused on an initiative Sachs and his gang launched a few years ago called the Millennium Villages Project. It’s intended to show by 2015 how even small, inexpensive but targeted investments can make a big difference in poor communities. Fourteen communities in Africa were selected for the project. Continue reading →