The Idealist

by Nina Munk

  “From my point of view, that place is like Job,” he said, alluding to Dertu and the biblical book of Job. “Just one disaster after another: droughts, floods, Rift Valley fever, rinderpest—you name it. It’s part of this general phenomenon, which is that water is the most powerful gradient across the villages. Where water control is extremely low and rainfall is extremely low, we see the worst crises. And that’s why we’re launching a pastoralist-only project starting in July, using Dertu as a model. Do you know about it? It’s important. The Drylands Initiative, we’re calling it. My view is that this is the hot spot of the entire world, and that it’s not a coincidence that Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and so forth are in the situation that they’re in.…”

  Part Eight

  This isn’t an intellectual exercise or a spectator sport. I’m trying to get something done. That’s what I do for a living.

  —Jeffrey Sachs

  Chapter 22

  An Island of Success

  In the beginning, it was easy to ignore or discredit critics of the Millennium Villages Project: they were ignorant, according to Sachs, or misinformed or misguided. He wrote off hostile journalists and bloggers as irresponsible thinkers, impediments to the greater good. “Either you decide to leave people to die or you decide to do something about it,” he’d say.

  Between his extraordinary command of historical facts and his combativeness, Sachs can flatten almost any opponent. Sometimes his tactics get ugly. In 2009, when the economist Dambisa Moyo published Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa, Sachs devoted more than two thousand words in The Huffington Post to Moyo’s book: her ideas about foreign aid were “farcical,” “simplistic,” and “mistaken.” With characteristic condescension, he took a mean-spirited swipe at her personally, describing her as “an African-born economist who reportedly received scholarships so that she could go to Harvard and Oxford but sees nothing wrong with denying $10 in aid to an African child for an anti-malaria bed net.”

  Sachs had launched the Millennium Villages Project in 2006 for two reasons: to test his theories about ending poverty, and to demonstrate that his proposed series of interventions could be used on a grand scale to eradicate extreme poverty across Africa. Five years later, in 2011, he was bragging about his success. As distributed by the Millennium project, reams of press releases, progress reports, blog posts, Twitter feeds, in-house videos, and pamphlets confirmed the happy results of Sachs’s experiment. According to the Millennium project’s annual report, it had led to “a stunning transformation of 500,000 lives.” The report goes on to praise the project’s “tremendous success,” “tremendous strides,” “remarkable progress,” and “major breakthroughs.” Sachs’s prescription for ending poverty was endorsed by his boss, UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, who called it “a case study in what is possible, even in the poorest of places in the world.”

  “The thrilling news is that the communities in the Millennium Villages are on track,” announced Sachs in 2011, as phase one of his project was about to end. “We are seeing dramatic gains in the fight against poverty, hunger, and disease. Incomes are rising, hunger is falling, and health is improving.” That was true in part, but it wasn’t the whole truth. By 2011, not even Sachs could ignore the wide and growing skepticism about the wisdom of his project.

  Progress had been made, certainly; the data, uneven and inconclusive though they were, confirmed as much. Then again, what did the data really demonstrate? Was this history in the making, as Sachs had claimed? Had he really discovered the solution to extreme poverty? “Sachs is essentially trying to create an island of success in a sea of failure,” remarked the economist William Easterly, “and maybe he’s done that, but it doesn’t address the sea of failure.”

  Some development experts dismissed the project outright. Yes, in Sachs’s villages, the prevalence of malaria had dropped, more women were giving birth with the help of trained birth attendants, child mortality was down, and generally speaking, people were better nourished. At the same time, those and similar improvements were happening all across sub-Saharan Africa, not only in the Millennium villages. One after another, reports from UNICEF, the World Bank, and the IMF confirmed that the lives of Africans were slowly improving. Between 2000 and 2010, for example, deaths from malaria fell by a third in Africa. Infant mortality rates dropped sharply. More African children than ever attended primary school. More Africans had access to safe drinking water. And in the midst of a global economic crisis affecting Europe and the United States, a number of sub-Saharan African economies were doing surprisingly well. “Africa could be on the brink of an economic takeoff,” predicted a 2011 World Bank report, “much like China was 30 years ago, and India 20 years ago.”

  A decade ago The Economist had written off Africa as “The Hopeless Continent.” Now even a cautious interpretation of statistics showed that the poorest of the African poor were slightly better off than they once were. For the first time since the World Bank began tracking such figures in 1981, the proportion of sub-Saharan Africans living in extreme poverty (defined as living on less than $1.25 a day) had fallen below 50 percent. The numbers were still shocking. And besides, the $1.25-a-day yardstick was arbitrary—more than half a billion people in sub-Saharan Africa continued to live on less than $2 a day. Still, the numbers pointed to a promising upward trend. “People used to worry, ‘Is Africa going to be poor forever?’ ” said Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. “Well, it doesn’t really look like it, does it?”

  Was there a direct correlation between Sachs’s carefully planned interventions and progress in his villages? If so, would some or all of that progress have happened one way or another, with or without the Millennium project? Is foreign aid the decisive factor in reducing extreme poverty, or should other key factors—increased trade and better government, for example—be taken into account? “The design of the project makes it impossible to carry out a truly rigorous assessment of the project’s effects,” concluded a damning critique of the Millennium Villages Project written by Michael Clemens and Gabriel Demombynes, development experts with the Center for Global Development and the World Bank, respectively. There was no reliable way to evaluate the Millennium project, they insisted, because the data used to measure outcomes in the villages were radically flawed.

  For one thing, there was no control group. “This has the advantage of simplicity but the major disadvantage of leaving unknown what might have happened in the villages if the project had not occurred,” wrote Clemens and Demombynes. “It attributes any observed changes to the interventions, when in fact some or all of those changes might have occurred in the absence of the Millennium Villages Project.” Looking closely at regional statistics and trends, and adjusting the Millennium project’s reported results accordingly, they concluded that the actual impact of the project was only half of what Sachs had claimed.

  According to a New Yorker profile of the economist Esther Duflo, written by Ian Parker, Sachs had at one time asked for Duflo’s advice about the best way to measure the results of the Millennium Villages Project. Duflo runs the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT. She’s famous for subjecting social policy interventions to randomized control trials, using the same rigor to establish cause and effect that pharmaceutical companies use to test drugs. She has won a MacArthur “genius” fellowship and in 2010 was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal for the most promising economist under the age of forty. Duflo explained to Sachs in an e-mail that while it was too late to use her methods to evaluate the first phase of his project, she could suggest better ways to measure outcomes going forward. He never replied.

  A few months later, as quoted in The New York Times, Sachs dismissed Duflo’s scientific approach to development. “Millennium villages don’t advance the way that one tests a new pill,” he argued.

  Duflo was outraged. “He adopts this completely anti-scientific attitude,” she said. “I am not really asking for a cr
azy standard of proof, just comparing.”

  “I don’t think they’re on target, I don’t think they’re good science, and I don’t think they’re apropos,” Sachs told me, referring to published critiques of the Millennium Villages Project. To focus on metrics—on “sustainability” and “scalability” and “randomized control trials”—is, in Sachs’s opinion, to reduce the lives of human beings to crude economic terms, to abstractions. “We are not waiting fifteen years for results—we are trying to move as fast as possible to help people who are suffering.” In effect, he wanted us to trust him, to accept without question his approach to ending poverty, to participate in a kind of collective magical thinking.

  Meanwhile, a growing number of journalists, economists, and development experts were uncovering inconsistencies and errors in the Millennium project’s published results. Clemens and Demombynes, for example, wouldn’t let up. “The project has claimed large impacts on school enrollment, vaccination rates, mobile phone ownership, malaria prevalence, HIV testing, access to improved water and sanitation, use of insecticide-treated bednets, and several others, and asserted that it is a ‘solution to extreme poverty,’ ” they wrote on The Guardian’s Poverty Matters Blog. “None of these claims is supported by published peer-reviewed research. The claims are also impossible to independently verify.”

  A Kenyan economist, Bernadette Wanjala, and her colleague Roldan Muradian concluded in a report that increased agricultural yields in the Millennium village of Sauri had not translated into higher household incomes. On a similar note, The Economist stated that the Millennium Villages Project had failed to prove that a “big push” in foreign aid was the way out of extreme poverty. On his blog, Lawrence Haddad, director of the UK’s Institute of Development Studies, asked the obvious question: “Who on earth will pay for this once the donors leave?”

  In each case, Sachs responded angrily: The Economist was “mistaken,” he wrote; Wanjala and Muradian’s conclusions were “outlandish”; Haddad’s critiques “reflect[ed] a real misunderstanding”; a negative article in the Daily Mail was “filled with falsehoods and distortions.”

  In the view of Sachs’s loyal inner circle, any attack on the project revealed a deep-rooted cynicism about foreign aid and development. Yes, Sachs may have a colossal ego, and he may be flawed; but what his followers see above all is a selfless genius driven to improve the world. As they’ll tell you with affection, Sachs is a “shit disturber,” willing to use bare-knuckled tactics to advance his agenda on behalf of the poor and disenfranchised. “This is Nobel Prize–winning stuff that Jeff is working on,” said his deputy, John McArthur. “Of course, he’ll never get the Nobel—but he should.”

  It was easy to sit back and criticize, to engage in “armchair criticism,” as Sachs called it. How many more studies were needed before the rich world agreed to alleviate the suffering of poverty-stricken Africans by providing them with mosquito nets, high-yield seeds and fertilizers, microfinance, emergency obstetrical care, antiretroviral medication, and other life-saving interventions? Sachs wasn’t seeking the approval of academics: ever since his work in Bolivia back in 1985, he’d been in the business of actually making things happen.

  “It’s a different kind of activity,” he said, distancing himself from his armchair critics. “This isn’t an intellectual exercise or a spectator sport. I’m trying to get something done. That’s what I do for a living. It’s not about being right and wrong—although being right is important in terms of the ultimate effect. But it’s about whether a large number of people operating in various organizations and in various positions and with various motives and incentives coalesce around an idea.”

  To those who said he’d failed to take his Millennium project to scale, Sachs replied: baloney. “If you’re asking, ‘Was the model a franchise, where every country would have the golden arches of the Millennium Villages [Project] in its villages?’ the answer is no, absolutely no.”

  He measured success more broadly, more subtly. “If three hundred million bed nets are distributed, that’s what I call scaling up,” he said defiantly. “If a dozen countries adopt agricultural programs to help their small-hold farmers, that’s what I call scaling up. If the concept of integrated, rural development becomes second nature across a lot of the development community, that’s what I call scaling up. If you mean that Jeff Sachs, personally, is the one doing each of those things; well, I don’t have time and it’s not my goal to have under my mandate a hundred thousand villages or five hundred thousand villages or whatever it is. My goal is to help propagate methods, tools, and ideas—and to show how things can be done. That’s what I’m trying to do. And that’s what we’re doing.”

  Chapter 23

  I Cry for Ahmed

  A drought was gripping the Horn of Africa—not just another drought, but the worst one in modern history. It was the summer of 2011, the land was parched, Dertu’s water hole had run dry, and people’s emaciated livestock were being eaten alive by hyenas and lions. Everywhere you went, roads were littered with animal carcasses. Starving Somalis, more dead than alive, were streaming across the border into Kenya. At the already overcrowded Dadaab refugee camps near Dertu, aid workers struggled to handle the influx. “A vision of hell,” the BBC called it.

  North Eastern Province was more dangerous than ever. The radical Islamist group Al Shabab was rumored to be moving from Somalia into Kenya. The insurgents were hungry, violent, and armed with Kalashnikovs. For the first time since I’d started reporting in Africa, I hired armed escorts to accompany me from Garissa upcountry. At every checkpoint, jumpy policemen demanded to see documents, inspected our vehicle, then waved their rifles to let us through. We were warned to stay off the roads after nightfall.

  Arriving in Dertu, I found the people despondent. Nearly a year and a half had passed since Ahmed was fired, and over time the memory of all that Ahmed had done for Dertu had grown. By this time, everything that was wrong with Dertu—the irreversible poverty, the dysfunction, the violence, the endless cycle of devastating droughts—was blamed on Ahmed’s absence. “When Dr. Ahmed left, everything left,” said Mohamed Ahmed Abdi, a village elder.

  “He was a man of development,” said the village chief, Jelle Dolal Bulle. “He treated us like his children, and now the community of Dertu we are very much missing Ahmed.”

  In the shade of a tree, the people of Dertu gathered to eulogize Ahmed. “When Ahmed was here, so many mzungu came to Dertu—from New York, from Sweden,” recalled Madame Sofia. “Ahmed brought the name of Dertu to the world. Now in a whole year we are having no more visitors.”

  Sahlan nodded. “Waan ooyeey Ahmed in uu soonokhdo,” she said—“I cry for Ahmed to come back.” From her perspective, life in Dertu was worse than ever. “It is God who has brought us this drought,” she despaired. A hum of agreement ran through the crowd. God was punishing the people of Dertu.

  “Since Ahmed has left us, there is only demoralization,” someone else said. “We appeal for the Millennium project to come back the way it was, Insha’Allah. But they are telling us there is no budget, no funds, no money for Dertu.”

  Leaning against the tree, the itinerant schoolteacher Abdullahi Bari Barow smiled. Since my last visit to Dertu, Abdullahi had lost his job: so many people had fled town in search of water that the Millennium project had disbanded its mobile school. “In Somali we have a phrase,” he remarked knowingly. “Ruux markuu kula jooga ma jeclid, markuuse tako baa tebi. It means when somebody is with you, you hate him—but when he leaves, you miss him so much.”

  A new boss was in charge of the Millennium Villages Project in Dertu. Born in North Eastern Province, Dr. Dabar Abdi Maalim was an ethnic Somali and a devout Muslim. He was a “good man” and a “religious man,” the people in Dertu said, but he was not Ahmed. He held a Ph.D. in community health from Britain’s University of Reading, where his doctoral thesis was devoted to the influence of culture on rates of immunization among nomadic Somalis. Before coming to Dertu,
he had worked for the World Health Organization, helping to coordinate emergency medical relief in North Eastern Province.

  Dabar’s job in Dertu was to continue the Millennium project’s development work, to build on the foundation that Ahmed had spent four years putting in place. When he arrived, however, he found “a village asunder,” as he put it to me. The foundation of the village had cracked wide open, and now, instead of running a development project, he was running a one-man emergency relief operation, racing to stave off famine.

  “When I accepted this job, it was suggested that I should put together a proposal for bringing irrigation to Dertu—but we don’t even have water for drinking,” he said. “It is not so simple to bring about the end of poverty when every few years comes a drought and you go back to where you started.”

  A few days later I was in the Nairobi airport, drinking a cold Tusker, waiting to board my flight home. The day I landed in New York, Al Shabab made its presence known in North Eastern Province: on a road I know well, a gang of Somali militants held up at gunpoint and took hostage a Kenyan driver for CARE, the humanitarian aid organization. That was just the beginning. A few weeks later, on Kiwayu, a Kenyan island just south of Somalia, gunmen burst into a British couple’s beachfront bungalow at three a.m., shot the man dead, dragged his wife to a speedboat, and took off for Ras Kamboni, a Somali fishing town and well-known base camp for Islamic militants. In Manda, another Kenyan island, Al Shabab took a French woman hostage. Two medical doctors working in the Dadaab refugee camps were kidnapped.