The Idealist

by Nina Munk

  Rather than depend on the whim and bank accounts of a few very rich people, the Millennium Villages Project needed “to mine channels of consumer giving,” argued Schaden and Ryan. Selling the end of poverty was not unlike selling sandwiches: it required a strong, identifiable brand, glossy brochures, and a catchy tagline. “That’s our vision,” said Ryan, “because, to us, it’s better to get ten dollars a year from the twenty percent of the Americans who like this cause than three million dollars from fifteen Rick Schadens. The math is much better. And it’s sustainable.”

  Working pro bono, the Quiznos marketing team proposed a confident new tagline for the Millennium Villages Project: “Extreme Poverty Ends Here.” Next, drawing up a road map for the Millennium project’s senior staff, they put together a so-called brand book that described the project’s “manifesto” in clear, compelling language that would inspire people to donate to the cause. The brand book included a list of adjectives to be used by fund-raisers: “dignified,” “hopeful,” “meaningful,” “authentic,” “optimistic,” and “confident.” It also set out a list of adjectives to be avoided (“gloomy,” “shocking,” “sad,” “hopeless,” “bureaucratic,” “corporate,” and “institutional”). One chapter explored the “psychographics” of potential donors: the sorts of people most likely to give money to the Millennium Villages Project were “earthy,” “cultured,” “compassionate,” “inquisitive,” and “fashionable.”

  Meanwhile, Quiznos’s advertising agency, Nitro Group, created an airbrushed brochure for the Millennium project. The cover featured a single photograph—a young African boy in profile, barefoot, silhouetted against the soft orange glow of an African sunset. Inside, printed on vellum, we read: “Extreme poverty ends here. It has to.” Now, full-page photographs: barren trees in a sun-drenched desert; a child’s pleading, outstretched hands; a dandelion, its seedpods scattered by the wind; sheaves of amber wheat. “Imagine, for a moment, if all the simple fundamentals of life were taken away from you.”

  Moving along: more sunsets, jagged rocks, an African man with a child strapped to his back, panoramic views of the savanna. “The human spirit is resilient and powerful. It cannot be contained by extreme poverty.” Now, the kicker: “Together, with you, we can assure that by 2025, extreme poverty ends here. It has to. And it will.”

  Schaden and Ryan convinced Sachs to hire a chief marketing officer, whose $350,000 salary would be paid for by Schaden. His name was Peter Kaye, and according to his bio, he was “a strategist with a passion for making a difference.” Since graduating from Harvard Business School in 1994, he’d helped to brand such consumer products as Nestlé’s Butterfinger candy bar, Dannon’s Fruit-on-the-Bottom yogurt, Diet Sprite, and Johnnie Walker. His latest assignment was to make a difference by branding poverty.

  For all that, Jeffrey Sachs was not convinced by the plan to mine channels of consumer giving. What Rick Schaden didn’t seem to grasp was that the Millennium Villages Project wasn’t like Doctors Without Borders, or Oxfam, or Operation Smile—it was about something much bigger than helping individuals. Sachs’s main goal was to convince policy makers to alter their approach to economic development in Africa. His aim was to end global poverty once and for all; he was shaking up the establishment, and clearly he could not depend on philanthropic donations in increments of ten dollars, nor even increments of $50 million. “Going slow and steady does not win the race,” he told me categorically.

  Sachs’s model for ending poverty in Africa was predicated on a huge increase in foreign aid, the “big push” that he had called for in The End of Poverty. He was establishing an innovative blueprint that the big international donor agencies—USAID, DFID, the whole UN establishment—would one day embrace and roll out everywhere. His goal was a massive scaling up of the Millennium project.

  “Getting money from USAID and DFID is our equivalent to an initial public offering” is how Jeffrey Walker, chairman of Millennium Promise, the charity that funnels money to the Millennium Villages Project, explained it to me. “It’s the ultimate leverage of our ideas—mission accomplished!”

  With enough foreign aid, the Millennium Villages Project could be franchised like an international chain of fast-food restaurants. “The model works,” said Walker, “so now the question is how to take it to scale. Is it McDonald’s? Can we have our version of Hamburger University, where we train people in our methods of development and send them out to launch Millennium villages?” He seemed to think so.

  Very well, but where would the “big push” in foreign aid come from? Who would bell the cat? You didn’t have to be a cynic to question a model whose outcome depended on promises made by rich countries to the developing world. As long ago as 1974, at the UN World Food Conference in Rome, 135 nations adopted the Universal Declaration on the Eradication of Hunger and Malnutrition. “Today we must proclaim a bold objective,” announced U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger in a rousing keynote address, “that within a decade no child will go to bed hungry, that no family will fear for its next day’s bread, and that no human being’s future and capacities will be stunted by malnutrition!”

  More recently, at the 2005 Group of Eight summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, the G8 leaders promised to double aid to Africa, from about $25 billion to $50 billion a year by 2010. As Sachs pointed out repeatedly, $50 billion was about equal to $100 a year for every sub-Saharan African—roughly in line with the Millennium Villages Project’s budget of $120 per person.

  “The way I look at it, it doesn’t cost anything to ask for money,” said Sachs. “So I advise Africa’s governments to come right out and demand money from the donor agencies—and then demand it again. And again. That’s what I do. I write a letter. Then another letter. Then an op-ed. And then I throw a tantrum. In the end, the money may appear—if only so they can get rid of me.”

  Africa’s leaders weren’t holding their breath. “Professor Sachs advises us that we shall get more money from the donors,” said Ezra Suruma, Uganda’s minister of finance, planning, and economic development. “I thank Professor Sachs for his optimism and for his goodwill. I am glad he is optimistic that the problem of poverty can be solved.”

  Pouring himself a cup of coffee from the silver urn in his office in Kampala, he continued: “Not everyone is as optimistic as Jeffrey Sachs. I enjoy optimistic people. But I’m sorry to say that while we were going through our budget last week, we had to cut our health spending because the donors cut their allocation. So from where I sit, the situation is not so rosy.”

  An economist who received his Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut in 1976, Suruma has had a long and distinguished career in Uganda as a professor, as a banker, and since 2005 as finance minister. In 2009 he was named Africa’s “Finance Minister of the Year” by the British trade magazine The Banker, whose editors commended Suruma’s “prudent fiscal policy.”

  “I went to the World Bank last year and told them we have a crisis,” Suruma said. “I told them, ‘It is a matter of urgency—please help us.’ ” Then, smiling, he added: “We are still waiting.”

  Chapter 13

  Capitalist Philanthropy

  By 2008 the strategy behind the Millennium Villages Project was changing radically. Sachs no longer seemed convinced that the project’s original plan of interventions—the “quick wins” he had anticipated in agriculture, health, and education—would be enough to lift people up and out of extreme poverty. Increasingly, he concerned himself with business development. Now commercial agriculture was more important to him than increased yields for small-hold farmers. Instead of lobbying only the big international donor agencies for more money, he was now lobbying venture capital investors. In brief, he was moving away from a model in which the end of poverty depended on foreign aid.

  “We’ve realized that we need much more of a business arm to this,” he said, speaking to me by cell phone on his way to catch another international flight, this time from New York to Addis Ababa. “Staple crops and tomatoe
s and sweet potatoes and all that stuff is fine—but it ain’t going to make you rich. What we need is commercial agriculture. And I’m pretty much convinced that any kind of high-value crop, for example, depends on better water control than we have right now. We can’t really get to the next stage without drip irrigation and microdams and refrigeration and storage and better clones and larger nurseries and paved roads. And we just need to get electricity into these villages—I think the end of poverty definitely depends on universal access to electricity. Basically, we can’t get to the next stage without things that cost a lot of money.

  “What we’ve been doing in the Millennium Villages Project is essentially making grants,” Sachs said, echoing what his critics had been saying all along: in its current form, the Millennium Villages Project was not development, it was charity. “Going forward, the big difference, technically, is that we’d make loans or equity investments, as opposed to aid, to get the villages up and running.” He continued, “So I envision this year, if things pan out, we’ll raise some tens of millions of dollars for this. That’s ambitious, but I think it can be done.”

  In early 2008, to accomplish his goal of making “loans or equity investments, as opposed to giving aid,” he hired a director of business development, Rustom Masalawala, who at one point had been a portfolio manager for the Acumen Fund, a nonprofit venture fund that supports small businesses in poor countries with the aim of earning “social returns” (rather than financial returns). Instead of demanding returns of, say, 20 or 30 percent on investments, Acumen is willing to accept 5 to 10 percent. Under Sachs, Masalawala would convince social investment funds like Acumen to underwrite business ventures in the Millennium villages.

  By then it had become fashionable to say that business was the solution to Africa’s problems. A few months before Masalawala was hired, the cover of Business Week asked, “Can Greed Save Africa?” Evidently it can: according to the businessmen and politicians featured in the article, private investment is a sure path to sustainable economic development. “We are capitalists and opportunists,” boasted the head of one British company investing in Africa. “We are doing this to make money. That’s the only way to help.”

  In effect, Masalawala’s job was to keep the Millennium Villages Project going after the original $120 million of philanthropic funding ran out—and it was running out. “The idea is to create real, rising income in the villages. And once you create that income, people can pay for the basics like education and health themselves,” he said. “It’s a fundamental difference in approach. These ventures are not cheap, but they’re probably the only way you will see sustained change. And if we get it right, we’ll have a very powerful model to show the world.”

  Masalawala’s desk in New York was cluttered with product samples he’d brought back from a recent visit to the Millennium villages: banana flour, ground cardamom, honey, fruit preserves. There were myriad opportunities to make money. “We’ll bring in cardamom seeds and plant them in the valleys of Ruhiira,” he said. “There’s a processing plant not far away where we can have the cardamom made into powder. The numbers are huge: the local price for one hundred grams is four thousand Ugandan shillings. That’s less than two dollars. In the United States, we pay ten dollars or more for the same thing!”

  Ginger offered even bigger profit margins. Then there was pineapple. Masalawala was confident that he could raise $850,000 from the UN Industrial Development Organization to establish large-scale production of fresh and dried pineapple in Ruhiira. Demand for pineapple in Europe was big and getting bigger every day.

  Masalawala imagined other business possibilities: banana cake mix, cocoa, palm oil, shea butter, chicken eggs, goat meat, sunflower seeds, fruit juice, myrrh, ecotourism. Sold under the brand name “Millennium Farms,” the products could be marketed like Fair Trade coffee and Max Havelaar bananas and roses, and be sold to consumers willing to pay a premium to help improve conditions in the developing word. “In my opinion, every Millennium village has two or three opportunities for very-high-value transactions over the next twelve months,” he assured me.

  “As soon as we have business plans, we can take them to investors in New York,” he went on. “It’s an ambitious idea. Each one of these is a complicated business plan. It’s all about local execution. You need to be hard-nosed about it. You need to make sure they run the business like entrepreneurs. But it can be done.”

  “Moving up the value chain” is what Sachs and Masalawala called the strategic move from subsistence crops to cash crops. And now David Siriri too adopted the management jargon used by his higher-ups in New York. He talked about “market linkages” and “input credits” and the “aggregation of produce,” and he devoted more and more of his time to the study of agribusiness. His job, as he understood it, wasn’t simply to provide a safety net for the people of Ruhiira, but to help them earn a living by preparing them for the efficiency of a cutthroat global economy. “They need to stand on their own two feet, the sooner the better,” he said. “We need to wean them from pampering.”

  The first step to launching business ventures, Siriri decided, was identifying and training entrepreneurs. Knowing how to run a business is not intuitive, particularly when it is not an integral part of the culture. “In Uganda, business is seen as a last resort; it is for people who have no other option,” said Richard Happy, a Ugandan accountant hired by Siriri to be Ruhiira’s enterprise facilitator. “Having a government job or being a farmer has far more status, so we have to work hard to change attitudes.”

  Starting a business requires a long-term outlook, but thinking long term is not easy for people living in extreme poverty. “If your only concerns are immediate needs, you think in the immediate term,” said Happy. “One year is the farthest horizon you get here.” That perspective was something else he intended to change.

  Emmy Byamukama was one of the aspiring entrepreneurs who enrolled in the Millennium project’s “Entrepreneurship Development and Business Skills Training Program.” Unable to support his family on his monthly salary of 200,000 Ugandan shillings (less than $100) as a schoolteacher, Byamukama had quit his job to start a backyard poultry farm. Consulting an old manual (Small-Scale Poultry Keeping: A Guide to Free-Range Poultry Production), he taught himself the basics of the trade: how to breed laying hens, how to prevent disease, and how to build a simple chicken coop using wooden poles and wire mesh. He and his wife, Beatrice, bought a few local hens and a rooster and began selling eggs to friends and relatives.

  Now Byamukama wanted to expand: he planned to sell eggs to shops and hotels in Mbarara, the biggest town in southwestern Uganda, and eventually as far away as Kampala, a good six-hour drive from Ruhiira. Encouraged by Richard Happy, he dreamed too of one day exporting his eggs to Rwanda or Kenya.

  Thanks to the Millennium Villages Project’s entrepreneurship program, Byamukama learned “The Five ‘P’s of Marketing”: Product, Place, Price, Promotion, Positioning. He learned basic financial accounting and terminology (“The break-even point helps you determine the level of operation where your business makes no profit or loss”). He was taught to “brainstorm” and to “think outside the box” and to be “proactive.” During a session designed to highlight the dangers of working with the wrong equipment, he was blindfolded and then instructed by Happy to build a tower of fifteen small wooden blocks. Not surprisingly, this was a difficult task: Byamukama’s tower never got higher than four blocks before collapsing.

  Of the two hundred people who initially signed up for the two-week course, seventy-six made it through successfully. One of them was Emmy Byamukama, who had put together a thoughtful, handwritten business plan for Twimukye Poultry Farm, as he’d named his company. Drawn on the cover was the logo he had designed, a simple oval (an egg) resting on the initials TPF. He had come up with a English slogan: “Buy and taste you will never regret.” Potential customers, competitors, suppliers, a marketing plan, equipment needed—every detail was included. A full page of the
business plan was devoted to his “Goals & Objectives,” primarily “to supply quality products to my customers.” He set out a list of potential dangers:

  1. Diseases—bird flu—which have no vaccine;

  2. Farm is not near veterinary services;

  3. Farm is not near customers;

  4. Farm is not near permanent source of water, hence a problem;

  5. Thieves.

  Looking ahead, and assuming he could raise the necessary capital to buy one thousand laying hens, Byamukama projected that within a year he would earn a monthly net profit of 76,200 Ugandan shillings ($35) on sales of 403,200 Ugandan shillings ($200). It wasn’t much, but it was a promising start.

  Jeffrey Sachs was enthusiastic about the possibilities of poultry farming in rural Africa. He had convinced Tyson Foods to help launch “poultry enterprises” in various Millennium villages, and already an executive from Tyson’s corporate headquarters in Springdale, Arkansas, had traveled to Ruhiira to work on a feasibility study.

  Meanwhile, from New York, Rustom Masalawala was urging David Siriri to plant cardamom, ginger, and pineapple—crops with real potential to earn money for the people of Ruhiira. Siriri had encouraged people to plant vitamin-rich vegetables such as carrots, spinach, and sweet potatoes in their shambas. And more than three hundred households were being trained in the art of backyard vegetable gardening. All well and good, Masalawala told him, but if the goal was to increase people’s incomes, Ruhiira needed cash crops—crops that could be exported.

  Masalawala was in talks with two companies who were keen to buy spices from Ruhiira, he said. He was working on a business plan, drafted for him by interns from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, in which he projected that with a modest initial investment of $45,000, dried ginger alone would generate for Ruhiira annual revenues “in the hundreds of thousands of dollars” and, by 2010, more than $1 million. Any day now, Masalawala assured Siriri, he’d be presenting the business plan to social investment funds in New York.