Name: The Idealist
ISBN: 9780771062506

Nina Munk

A powerful portrayal of Jeffrey Sachs's ambitious quest to end global poverty. As Secretary General of the United Nations and author of Fools Rush In Sachs argues that extreme poverty is a solvable problem, drawing on success stories from his daring five-year Millennium Villages Project experiment in Africa to demonstrate how specific initiatives can enable profound positive changes.

Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty

The Idealist

Christine Liu

Although The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time has been on my to-read list for years, what I knew of Jeffrey Sachs before reading this book comes mostly from taking his course, “The Age of Sustainable Development”, on Coursera. It’s clear watching his lectures that he knows a lot about the topic and that he’s incredibly passionate about what he believes is the central challenge of our time - how to create sustainable economic prosperity in a way that is equitable and inclusive for all of the 7.2 billion and counting people on the planet today, over 1 billion of whom are currently living in a state of extreme poverty without access to clean water, adequate health care, or basic sanitation. Sachs’ conviction that this kind of crippling poverty can be eradicated with a massive outpouring of foreign aid and his work in developing the Millennium Villages Project are the central focus of Nina Munk’s book, The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the the Quest to End Poverty.

The Millennium Villages Project began in 2005 as a $120 million undertaking to achieve replicable development models in 14 small villages in sub-Saharan Africa using an aggressive multi-pronged intervention to simultaneously tackle such issues as preventing malaria with mosquito nets, transitioning from subsistence farming to commercial agriculture with high-yield seeds and fertilizers, programs to increase school attendance, and improving healthcare and access to much needed medical supplies to lift people out of the so-called poverty trap, “an overwhelming, interconnected burden of disease, illiteracy, high fertility rates, dismal agricultural productivity, lack of capital, weak or nonexistent infrastructure, debt, hunger, drought, malnutrition…” While there’s no question that Sachs is a driven and tireless individual who cares deeply about the plight of the developing world and that his heart is in the right place, the reality that emerges from this book is rather disheartening.

Munk focuses primarily on two of the millennium villages - Dertu, Kenya and Ruhiira, Uganda - and documents the challenges that these communities encounter over a span of several years and what the impact of these aid projects means in human terms to a small, rural community on a person to person scale. One key difficulty is the cultural and psychological disconnect between the people developing the projects and the people the projects are supposed to benefit. For example, creating a local livestock market in Dertu may make economic sense from a Western “time is money” perspective that assumes that time saved in not having to travel long distances means money saved in the long run, but it fails to take into account the fact that the largely pastoral people of Dertu and other nearby villages would don’t mind undertaking a four-day trek for a marginally better selling price or the fact that for Somalis, the number of animals someone owns is more important as a status symbol than the actual monetary value they could fetch in the marketplace.

Another program to extend agricultural credit to farmers also failed when low-interest loans were indiscriminately handed out to farmers with no credit history. In the end, the MVP was unable to recover its investment after two-thirds of the farmers defaulted due to various reasons: their crops failed, they secretly resold the fertilizer they were given, they used the loan money for non-agricultural purposes, or they just didn’t understand the terms of the loan. At other times, villagers resisted advice to cut tall grass for fear of angering the gods while women continued to practice genital mutilation and brush off outside attempts at reform with the casual observation that “mzungu (Westerners) come and mzungu go", the One of the greatest criticisms of Sachs and aid projects like the MVP is that they create a culture of dependency and perpetuate the myth that the world’s poor can only be saved by foreign aid, and many people throughout the book ask variations of the question, what happens when the workers leave? What happens when the funding runs out?

There are no easy answers when it comes to the issue of alleviating poverty, and Munk does a wonderful job of illustrating the complexities and barriers that exist despite the best intentions of some of the most brilliant minds. The scope of Sachs’ optimism, his contentiousness when faced with skepticism and dissent, and the ultimately uninspiring outcomes of his Millennium Villages Project make him an easy target for critics to pass scathing judgments about expensive aid projects that are debilitating, short-sighted, and only exacerbate the problem. However, this story in Munk’s hands is a well-written and graceful work of journalism that offers a eye-opening look at what happens when an ambitious and admirable mission falls somewhat short of its vision. It’s a fascinating and easy to read introduction to the complexities of international development and is recommended reading for anyone with an interest in global poverty.

The Idealist Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty

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