The Idealist

by Nina Munk

  Sachs had another good idea: he’d convince the World Food Program (WFP) to buy Ruhiira’s surplus crops of corn and beans in bulk. More and more, the WFP had become involved in economic development. Instead of doling out food aid, the program aimed to establish markets and improve agricultural yields in poor countries by buying food from small local farmers. Already the WFP was purchasing around $50 million a year of maize and beans from small-hold farmers in Uganda. Now, backed by the Gates Foundation and USAID, a new pilot program known as Purchase for Progress (P4P) promised to at least double that figure.

  Thanks to Sachs’s persistence, the WFP agreed to expand its P4P program to Ruhiira, committing to buy 150 tons of kidney beans at the next harvest, in 2008. A “forward contract” guaranteed the sale at 20 percent above market prices. If all went well, Siriri understood, the WFP would commit to buying as much of Ruhiira’s surplus crops as he could supply.

  For commercial agriculture to take strong roots in Ruhiira, the village had to move away from rain-fed agriculture by improving its water supply. With access to irrigation, farmers could cultivate two or three cash crops a year instead of one. According to Rustom Masalawala, the end of poverty depended on nothing less than three crops a year.

  Some of the other Millennium villages had already introduced methods of irrigation. In Toya, the Millennium village at the southern edge of the Sahara in northern Mali, where the dry season lasts for nine to ten months, the project spent $40,000 to buy two huge diesel-fueled pumps to draw water from the Niger, West Africa’s great river. Traditionally, Toya’s farmers had planted floating rice in the lowlands, where they depended on the annual floodwaters for irrigation. Now, thanks to the water pumps, the village had two rice crops a year instead of one.

  Ruhiira’s situation was more complicated than Toya’s, however. For one thing, Ruhiira has no river. For another, because practically every tree has been chopped down for firewood, rainwater shoots down the steep slopes in torrents, collecting in stagnant ponds on the valley floor. Some people in Ruhiira traveled six kilometers (3.7 miles) a day to fetch water from the valley. “I can tell you,” attested Siriri, “walking six kilometers on a flat area is very different than walking six kilometers on a hilly area like Ruhiira—it’s a lot of hard work.”

  Improving Ruhiira’s water supply was vital; everyone agreed on that. But how to go about it? “It’s very complicated,” said a young American engineer named Brett. The Millennium project had sent him to Ruhiira, and now, standing with me at the top of a ridge, looking down the steep path to the village’s main water supply, he kept shaking his head. “It’s three hundred vertical meters from that water source in the valley to the hills where people live.” He pointed somewhere in the distance. “So from an engineering standpoint, it’s hugely complicated. Ideally there would be four pumps and three diesel generators with twenty to thirty kVA—those are big generators. Plus we need PVC pipes—ninety kilometers of PVC pipes. It’s complicated.”

  Siriri understood the complexities of Ruhiira’s water supply better than anyone. Even before the Millennium Villages Project had arrived here, a Christian mission called Africa Community Technical Service, or ACTS, had devoted five years to the task of bringing clean water to this part of Uganda. Rather than depend on expensive electric or diesel generators, ACTS had designed a simple gravity-flow water supply system. Single-handedly, a team of enthusiastic volunteers from western Canada—engineers, surveyors, technicians, construction workers—had built the system from the ground up. As soon as their work was completed, they went home—whereupon something went very wrong. The flow of water became inconsistent. Many of the taps installed throughout the village went dry. Either there wasn’t enough water pressure, people surmised, or the system wasn’t sufficiency robust. In any case, no one in Ruhiira knew how to fix it.

  On his first visit to Ruhiira in early 2007, Jeffery Sachs had been shocked to see the village’s main water source: the floating bugs, the runoff of excrement, the mud. “Our problem here, sir, is water,” the local member of parliament, Alex Bakunda, had told him at the time. “Water, water, water.”

  Since then Sachs had managed to convince JM Eagle, the world’s largest manufacturer of plastic pipes, to donate $150,000 worth of PVC pipes to Ruhiira. The pipes were ready to be shipped, and would be, just as soon as engineers figured out the logistics of piping water up and over the hills. As it turned out, however, the estimated cost of transporting the PVC pipes from any one of JM Eagle’s manufacturing plants in the United States to Ruhiira was almost as high as the value of the pipes themselves: around $120,000, according to Siriri’s research. To complicate matters further, JM Eagle’s pipes and fittings were incompatible with Ugandan pipes and fittings, which are manufactured to British standards. Siriri wasn’t complaining—he was grateful for JM Eagle’s help—but all in all, he reckoned, it would be easier and more efficient if JM Eagle simply made a cash donation that allowed him to buy the pipes locally.

  While the New York office was struggling with the problem of incompatible PVC pipes, Masalawala came up with an inspired idea: Why not use donkeys to transport water from Ruhiira’s valleys up to the hills where people lived? “Rather than sit around waiting for piped water to happen, I am convinced we can do the job with pack animals,” he said. “Did you know that just four donkeys can carry eight hundred liters at a time? 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.

  Part Five

  What can we do? We cannot enforce. We try to explain. We want to empower. But no one can come and change them if they do not want to change themselves.

  —Ahmed Maalim Mohamed

  Chapter 14

  Setbacks

  Writing business plans was not one of Ahmed Mohamed’s strengths. Still, his supervisors in New York had warned him that in order to keep money flowing into Dertu, he had to come up with a big idea that would appeal to a social investment fund in America. So in the spring of 2008, he got to work.

  “Business Plan for Small-Scale Milk Processing and Marketing in Dertu” was the title of Ahmed’s proposal—though, honestly, it reads more like an academic research report than a business plan. Under the subheading “Investment Rationale,” Ahmed wrote: “There are large quantities of milk produced by the pastoralist[s] which exceed the consumption and [a] large amount of it goes into waste (spoilage). The excess milk if processed, cooled and stored will contribute to the nutrition and income of the people of Dertu and the region especially in dry seasons.”

  From New York, Rustom Masalawala returned Ahmed’s business proposal with dozens of disheartening questions and comments. Among them: “There is no such thing [in this plan] to suggest a Return on Investment—we need to have a P/L or an Income Statement and a Cash Flow [Statement] in a standard format that industry accepts.” And: “You need to talk about how you will compete in this space and why our product will be superior.” And: “No one will fund the project if we do not have a clear idea of what equipment we want to buy and how we plan to use it.”

  Ahmed and his deputy, Idris, then spent weeks writing a more detailed, more confident business plan. Boldly, they took stabs at guessing the potential size of the market for camel milk. They drew up a Profit and Loss Statement. Then, dutifully, respectfully, they sent the business plan back to New York. Again Masalawala deemed it unsatisfactory: “You have talked about selling thousands of liters of milk a day in the P/L and here your total quantity adds up to no more than 100 liters or so,” he wrote. “This is completely inconsistent and needs much more explanation.”

  Ahmed and Idris tried again. And again Masalawala demanded major revisions: “I am sure this will feel frustrating but unfortunately these are the standards investors set before giving out money.”

  Eventually, fed up with t
he charade, Ahmed ignored Masalawala’s increasingly insistent e-mails. “This is the fourth email that I am sending you—the other three have received no responses at all,” wrote Masalawala. “I am now wondering if these mails are getting through to you—or if there is some other specific reason for the lack of response.” In fact, there was a specific reason: things were going badly in Dertu.

  Dertu’s aging borehole had broken down, and not for the first time. In this instance, however, the situation was especially dire: it was the dry season, and both generator-driven pumps had given out at once. There were no spare parts in Dertu, and no one had the skills to fix the pumps. And so, in a panic, Ahmed spent $1,500 of his budget to have a 9,000-liter (3,778-gallon) tanker deliver water to Dertu until one of the pumps could be replaced.

  But 9,000 liters wasn’t enough water for the thousands of thirsty people and animals that congregated in Dertu. Fighting broke out among the villagers. The driver of the water truck was beaten by an angry mob. A sixteen-year-old boy, accused of cutting in line, was stabbed to death. “It traumatizes me,” Ahmed said. “This is about life and death. A human being is only orderly when things are in plenty.”

  Meanwhile, yet another famine threatened the region. “Horn of Africa: Exceptional Food Security Crisis” was the headline of a 2008 bulletin issued by the Red Cross. A combination of drought, poor harvests, and soaring food prices had combined to create “the perfect storm,” as Sachs referred to it.

  In an urgent e-mail to his bosses in Nairobi, Ahmed requested permission to buy a new pump. “This is to inform you that the two boreholes in Dertu suddenly broke down,” he wrote, “and the local community are in critical/emergency water crisis. There is not even a drop of water at the village. Lives are in danger (both human and livestock). The stories narrated are very pathetic, e.g. pastoral mothers who left their young ones some 20–30 km away to get water by donkeys could not hold back tears when they found out that there is no water at the borehole to help their dear ones and themselves.”

  Ahmed needed 400,000 to 500,000 Kenyan shillings ($5,000 to $6,000) for a new pump. The Millennium project’s Nairobi office was of course sympathetic, but in responding to Ahmed’s request, they noted that repairing the pumps was no more than a short-term solution to Dertu’s water problems. “I usually liken boreholes to babies who do not show signs of illnesses until they are critically or fatally sick,” one of the coordinators responded knowingly. “This happens all the time with boreholes but investors never learn.”

  Back in 2006 the project had concluded that Dertu’s population could be sustained only if multiple water sources were available—shallow wells, roof catchment systems, and huge water-pan reservoirs to harvest rainwater, for example. The project had allocated $23,000 to “empower the local community to manage these water resources,” and yet with the exception of a few water tanks at the school and the clinic, no long-term solution had materialized.

  Besides, the Nairobi office wanted to know, didn’t Dertu’s Water Users Association have its own money to buy new pumps? For each camel that drank at the borehole, herders had to pay six Ksh, money that was supposed to pay for fuel, maintenance, and repairs. Where had this money gone? Ahmed had no idea why the Water Users Association lacked money to replace the broken pumps; he only knew that the people of Dertu needed water desperately. If money was being embezzled, as some had begun to suspect, he knew nothing about it.

  Everything in Dertu was proving more expensive than the Millennium Villages Project had planned for: fuel, staple foods, building supplies. The value of the U.S. dollar had fallen and prices had soared since the project’s launch in early 2006. Ahmed was almost out of money; he faced budget cutbacks in the coming year, and the people of Dertu felt cheated. More and more of his time was now devoted to pleading for additional funding from the Millennium Villages Project and from any other donor he could think of.

  Construction of the boys’ dormitory at Dertu’s school had been completed, but there was no money left over to buy mattresses. At the health clinic, the new maternity ward was two-thirds complete, but the contractors refused to finish the job unless they were paid more than the sum they’d originally agreed to. The laboratory technician demanded a raise of 10,000 Ksh a month, about $120—and when his demand was not met, he quit, with the result that there was no lab technician in Dertu for almost a year and the clinic’s microscope, donated by the Millennium project to diagnose malaria and TB, gathered dust, literally, and sand. Dertu’s one itinerant schoolteacher now had 392 students, and there was no budget to hire another teacher.

  There were other setbacks. The project’s attempts to diversify Dertu’s food supply had been for nothing. For Dertu’s demonstration farm, Ahmed had planted row after row of sorghum, a cereal crop more tolerant of drought than corn, but the seeds were devoured by a swarm of Red-billed Quelea—“locust birds,” as they’re known in Africa. They darkened the land like storm clouds, huge ominous flocks swooping in to devastate the fields. As for the eighty-four hoes and eight spades that Ahmed had given out to promote farming in Dertu, they disappeared without a trace.

  A “kitchen gardening” program, meant to encourage the women of Dertu to grow kale and tomatoes in burlap sacks, hadn’t worked either. The high saline content of Dertu’s groundwater was to blame, someone said. The women had received no proper training, someone else explained. Somalis didn’t like kale, another person told me.

  One way or another, Dertu’s agricultural experiments were not a success. “Dertu should be green by now,” observed Ahmed. “We’ve given away five thousand seedlings, but people don’t understand the importance of trees. There is not a culture of tree plantings.”

  For the first time since I’d known him, Ahmed looked discouraged. I arrived in Dertu one day just as he was leaving for Nairobi. The purpose of his trip was to raise money to buy six hundred goats, part of a “restocking” program to donate livestock to Dertu’s poorest residents. The Millennium Villages Project had promised the goats long ago, but by this time there was no money for them in the budget, and the people of Dertu were resentful. “The community is on our neck,” Ahmed said. “They say, ‘You build, but you never complete.’ ”

  In its annual report for 2008, the Millennium Villages Project stated that Dertu’s livestock market was generating $14,000 a month in “profit”—a dreamlike figure that should have been questioned in New York, if anyone had paid close attention to the numbers. In reality, the livestock market never generated a cent.

  Persuaded by Jeffrey Sachs’s sweeping vision, Ahmed did everything in his power to rally support for the livestock market in Dertu. He met again and again with the village elders. He hosted six town hall meetings for the community. And to encourage their interest and participation, he invited the district commissioner and other local dignitaries to visit the market. Despite Ahmed’s efforts, however, Dertu’s livestock market was formally abandoned a few months after it opened.

  What went wrong? Again, the answer depends on whom you speak to. Explanation A: The bigger, more established market in Garissa made a market in Dertu superfluous. B: The market was undermined by local politicians who wanted a cut of the profits. C: Various clans and subclans feuded for control. D: Herders wanted to sell their goats and sheep whenever the spirit moved them, not only on weekly market days. E: The community hadn’t been properly trained or “sensitized.”

  Development is complicated and full of natural and cultural pitfalls. The explanation that makes the most sense may be the most obvious one: in planning for Dertu’s livestock market, the Millennium Villages Project ignored the idiosyncrasies of Somali nomadic pastoralists. Economically speaking, the core assumption behind the founding of the livestock market was the so-called Rational Man theory, the classical economic model that presumes that people act in their own best interest. A simple, rational cost-benefit analysis would suggest that it is better all around to sell livestock in Dertu rather than in Garissa. After all, time is money.


  But what if, for the people of Dertu, time was not money? In that case, spending three or four days trekking to and from the livestock market in Garissa might not be a wasteful or an uneconomical use of time after all. “These pastoralists, they will travel even four hundred kilometers to get an extra hundred shillings,” said Ahmed, who was trying hard to understand why his people were resisting change. “Time is not a factor.”

  There’s something else, a cultural fact that had long confused outsiders in the Horn of Africa: the whole concept of selling one’s livestock is antithetical to Somali values. Somalis hoard camels, even when it makes no good economic sense to do so.

  Now and again, when they need money, people in Dertu will sell their goats or sheep. Ahmed liked to refer to those animals as a nomad’s ATM, by which he meant that in a place with no commercial banks, they served as a quick source of cash. But in the eyes of Somalis, camels are very different from goats and sheep. Camels are slaughtered, sold, or traded only on the most important occasions—a wedding, for instance. Camels are used as dowry. In the case of tribal killings, they’re paid out to a victim’s family as diyal.

  One much-cited study, published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, concludes that in much of rural Africa, the actual number of animals that a herder owns is more important to him than their underlying monetary value; the animals are “an end in themselves.” To quote a 1928 report by a colonial administrator in Kenya: “It is the old story of the vicious circle. The natives amass stock until the country will no longer carry it, a period of drought or disease occurs, heavy losses are incurred and the process of amassing stock again commences.”