The Idealist

by Nina Munk

  Chapter 7. It Will Be Sweet Like Honey

  “At the most basic level”: Sachs, End of Poverty, 244.

  “settle the landless, create employment”: World Bank (Agriculture Operations Division, Eastern Africa Department, Africa Regional Office), Project Completion Report. Kenya. Bura Irrigation Settlement Project (Credit 722-KE/LOAN 1449-KE), report no. 8493 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 30 March 1990).

  “doomed”: Ibid.

  the average dilal in Garissa made between 15,000 and 20,000 Ksh: Yacob Aklilu and Andy Catley, Livestock Exports from the Horn of Africa: An Analysis of Benefits by Pastoralist Wealth Group and Policy Implications (Somerville, Mass.: Feinstein International Center, Tufts University, 2010).

  He hoped to have as many as one thousand Millennium villages: [Jonathan Ledger], “The Magnificent Seven: How a Few Simple Reforms Can Lift African Villages Out of Poverty,” Economist, 27 April 2006.

  Chapter 8. A Pipe Dream

  “The Economic Burden of Malaria”: John Luke Gallup and Jeffrey D. Sachs, “The Economic Burden of Malaria,” The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 64, no. 1, supp. (January–February 2001).

  “Fever destroys the capacity to work”: Italian government quoted in Frank Snowden, The Conquest of Malaria: Italy, 1900–1962 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), 93.

  In India, for example, where malaria had killed 800,000 people: Malcolm Gladwell, “The Mosquito Killer,” New Yorker, 2 July 2001.

  in self-defense, it mutated: Sonia Shah, The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 217.

  Sri Lanka, for example: Andrew Spielman and Michael D’Antonio, Mosquito: The Story of Man’s Deadliest Foe (New York: Hyperion, 2001), 172–78.

  “All you have to do is fly over”: C. P. Gilmore, “Malaria Wins Round 2,” New York Times Magazine, 25 September 1966.

  “It just blows my mind how little money”: Bill Gates quoted in Michael Specter, “What Money Can Buy,” New Yorker, 24 October 2005.

  global funding for malaria control soared: N. Ravishankar et al., “Financing of Global Health: Tracking Development Assistance for Health from 1990 to 2007,” Lancet 373, no. 9681 (20 June 2009).

  aimed to cut deaths from malaria in half by 2010: Roll Back Malaria, The Global Malaria Action Plan for a Malaria-Free World (Geneva: Roll Back Malaria Partnership, WHO, 2008), 125. The stated target was “to reduce malaria mortality and morbidity by 50%” in sub-Saharan Africa by 2010 and to reach “near zero mortality” by 2015.

  the distinguished Swiss parasitologist Christian Lengeler: Christian Lengeler, “Insecticide-Treated Bed Nets and Curtains for Preventing Malaria,” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, no. 2, art. no. CD000363 (2004).

  Lengeler reckons that the task of moving one million bed nets: Urs Heierli and Christian Lengeler, Should Bednets Be Sold, or Given Free? The Role of the Private Sector in Malaria Control (Berne: SDC Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, 2008).

  “unethical”: Jeffrey Sachs, Awash Teklehaimanot, and Christopher Curtis, “Towards Sustainable Malaria Control—Authors’ Reply,” Lancet 370, no. 9600 (17 November 2007).

  “one of the shocking crimes”: Sachs quoted in Leslie Roberts, “Battling Over Bed Nets,” Science 318, no. 5850 (26 October 2007).

  “one Starbucks coffee a year”: Jeffrey Sachs, “The $10 Solution,” Time, 4 January 2007.

  “One day’s Pentagon spending”: Jeffrey Sachs, “Bursting at the Seams,” Reith Lectures, BBC Radio 4, 11 April 2007.

  Every year epidemiologists count 250 million cases of malaria worldwide: World Health Organization, World Malaria Report 2008 (Geneva: World Health Organization, 2008).

  The big foreign aid donors had spent years: Heierli and Lengeler, Should Bednets be Sold, or Given Free?.

  an inconvenient but inevitable part of everyday life: Shah, Fever, 125.

  And yet by 2007, despite the donors’ best efforts: Kara Hanson et al., “Household Ownership and Use of Insecticide Treated Nets Among Target Groups After Implementation of a National Voucher Programme in the United Republic of Tanzania,” British Medical Journal 339:b2434 (2 July 2009).

  Even fewer people were actually using them: The percentage of Tanzanians who slept under an insecticide-treated net in 2007 was 20.5, according to Sabine Renggli et al., “Design, Implementation and Evaluation of a National Campaign to Deliver 18 Million Free Long-Lasting Insecticidal Nets to Uncovered Sleeping Spaces in Tanzania,” Malaria Journal, in press.

  The reason Tanzanians weren’t using bed nets: Sachs is not alone in arguing that demand for bed nets is price sensitive. One recent study concludes that, compared to the demand for free bed nets, demand drops by 60 percent if the price is increased to just 60 cents: see Jessica Cohen and Pascaline Dupas, “Free Distribution or Cost-Sharing? Evidence From a Randomized Malaria Prevention Experiment,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 125, no. 1 (February 2010).

  “Giving away free bed nets is not development”: Julie McLaughlin, interview by author, 10 March 2008.

  “With due respect to his renown[ed] reputation”: Private letter from Bergis Schmidt-Ehry, program manager of GTZ’s Tanzanian German Program to Support Health, to Vincent Mrisho, coordinator of the Global Fund in the office of Tanzania’s prime minister, 2 July 2007. Note: In 2011, GTZ was folded into GIZ, a new umbrella organization for Germany’s development agencies.

  “A mass net distribution on its own”: Christian Lengeler e-mail to Jeffrey Sachs et al., “Re: Tanzania is on track,” 13 July 2007.

  “Frankly,” Sachs informed Lengeler: Jeffrey Sachs e-mail to Christian Lengeler et al., “Re: Tanzania is on track,” 13 July 2007.

  “One day’s Pentagon spending”: Ibid.

  Chapter 9. Complacency and Fear

  Kilimanjaro Hotel Kempinski: In 2011, after a change in management, the hotel was renamed Hyatt Regency Dar es Salaam, The Kilimanjaro.

  more than $2 billion in foreign aid: Elena Rotarou and Kazuhiro Ueta, “Foreign Aid and Economic Development: Tanzania’s Experience with ODA,” The Kyoto Economic Review 78, no. 2 (December 2009).

  “neocolonial”: Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, “Leadership and the Management of Change,” speech delivered at the Quinquennial General Conference of the Association of Commonwealth Universities, Ottawa, Canada, 17 August 1998.

  “The English have a proverb which says”: Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, “Arusha Declaration,” policy statement presented on 5 February 1967, reprinted in Nyerere, Freedom and Socialism: A Selection from Writings and Speeches, 1965–1967 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969).

  less corrupt than Russia, for example: As measured by Transparency International’s 2011 Corruption Perceptions Index, on a scale of 0 to 10 (where 0 is “highly corrupt” and 10 is “very clean”), Tanzania scores 3, Russia scores 2.4, and Kenya scores 2.2.

  “free or highly subsidized”: “WHO Releases New Guidance on Insecticide-Treated Mosquito Nets,” World Health Organization press release, 16 August 2007.

  “bold but achievable”: “Secretary-General Announces ‘Roll Back Malaria Partnership’ on World Malaria Day to Halt Malaria Deaths by Ensuring Universal Coverage by End of 2010,” United Nations press release, 25 April 2008.

  “On behalf of the people, leaders and governments”: Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete, “Statement by H. E. Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete, President of the United Republic of Tanzania, and Chairman of the African Union, in Response to the UN-SG Call to Action on Malaria,” PR Newswire, 25 April 2008.

  Not long afterwards a $200 million grant came through: More than half of this money, $112.3 million, was funded in Round 8 of the Global Fund, approved in 2008. An additional $14.6 million for insecticide-treated nets (out of a total $35 million for all malaria-related interventions) was approved in 2008 by the President’s Malaria Initiative (see PMI’s “FY09 Malaria Operational Plan: Tanzania,” 16 November 2008). Other major partners included the World Bank’s Booster Program for Mala
ria Control in Africa.

  “None of us could have imagined”: Christian Lengeler, interview by author, 10 September 2010. For a detailed report on recent efforts to control malaria in Tanzania, see Roll Back Malaria, Focus on Mainland Tanzania, Progress & Impact Series no. 3 (Geneva: Roll Back Malaria Partnership, WHO, January 2012).

  300 million bed nets across sub-Saharan Africa: To reach the 2010 target of universal coverage for populations at risk, Roll Back Malaria estimated that 350 million long-lasting insecticidal nets were needed in all. Assuming that 50 million to 100 million nets were already in circulation, Roll Back Malaria concluded that 250 million to 300 million additional nets were needed. See Roll Back Malaria, The Global Malaria Action Plan for a Malaria-Free World (Geneva: Roll Back Malaria Partnership, WHO, 2008), 125.

  Let’s say that universal coverage of bed nets is achieved: In December 2012, the World Health Organization announced that great progress had been made toward the goal of universal coverage, and as a result 1.1 million lives were saved around the world. However, WHO also noted that after a rapid expansion between 2004 and 2009, global funding for malaria prevention and control had leveled off between 2010 and 2012, and the number of nets delivered in sub-Saharan Africa had dropped from a peak of 145 million in 2010 to 66 million in 2012: “This means that many households will be unable to replace existing bed nets when required, exposing more people to the potentially deadly disease.” WHO, “New Report Signals Slowdown in the Fight Against Malaria,” news release, 17 December 2012.

  Chapter 10. David Siriri

  “Uganda is from end to end one beautiful garden”: Winston Churchill, My African Journey (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1908; New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 56–57.

  “habits of obedience, self-control, purity, and truth”: Mrs. Sumner, “The Responsibilities of Mothers,” printed in Angela Burdett-Coutts, ed., Woman’s Mission: A Series of Congress Papers on the Philanthropic Work of Women by Eminent Writers (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1893), 68.

  “I am not an ambitious man”: Idi Amin quoted in Leslie Alan Horvitz and Christopher Catherwood, Encyclopedia of War Crimes and Genocide (New York: Facts on File, 2006), 15.

  “Even Amin does not know”: Russell Miller, “Amin’s Murders: Minister Defects with Full Story—Word Exclusive,” Sunday Times [London], 5 June 1977.

  exports of coffee, tea, and cotton dropped: Mark Baird et al., Uganda: Country Economic Memorandum (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1982), 5.

  World Agroforestry Center: At the time Siriri worked there, it was called the International Center for Research in Agroforestry.

  Chapter 11. A Green Revolution

  Sadati and his fellow banana boys: For a thorough look at the matoke market chain in Uganda, see K. Nowakunda, D. Ngambeki, and W. Tushemereirwe, “Increasing Small-Scale Farmers’ Competitiveness in Banana (Musa spp.) Production and Marketing,” Acta Horticulturae 879 (2010): 759–66.

  “A typical, inefficient exploitive market chain”: Erastus Kibugu, interview by author, 14 January 2007.

  No one used chemical fertilizers or high-yield seeds: Even when compared to those of such other Eastern African countries as Kenya, Malawi, and Ethiopia, Uganda’s farming practices are outdated. For an explanation, see Stephen Bayite-Kasule, “Inorganic Fertilizer in Uganda—Knowledge Gaps, Profitability, Subsidy, and Implications of a National Policy,” briefing paper, International Food Policy Research Institute, 2009.

  rural poverty fell from 64 percent to 50 percent: World Bank, World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2007), 46.

  “one of the most important triumphs of targeted science”: Sachs, End of Poverty, 259.

  “The good news to me is that there’s absolutely nothing wrong”: Jeffrey Sachs, “What Will It Take to Meet the Millennium Development Goals?,” speech presented at the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), London, 13 September 2007.

  “It’s like hitting the sixty-four-billion-dollar jackpot”: Ibid.

  farmers receive $15 billion a year: According to the Environmental Working Group’s Farm Subsidy Database, from 2006 to 2010, the U.S. Department of Agriculture spent an average of $16 billion a year on farm subsidies.

  In Europe, the figure is around $70 billion: According to farmsubsidy.org, the European Union spends around €55 billion a year on farm subsidies.

  Why, even the average European cow: The source for the oft-quoted figure of 4,000 Swiss francs ($4,300) is Silvio Borner, professor emeritus at University of Basel; in a 13 April 2012 e-mail to the author, he referred to it as a “rough guesstimate.”

  “present-biased preferences”: Esther Duflo, Michael Kremer, and Jonathan Robinson, “Nudging Farmers to Use Fertilizer: Theory and Experimental Evidence from Kenya,” American Economic Review 101, no. 6 (October 2011).

  “The Enlightenment commitment to reason”: Sachs, End of Poverty, 353.

  The entire cost of the inputs: Millennium Promise, Uganda: Millennium Villages Cluster Report: Quarters 1–2, 2007 (New York: Millennium Promise, August 2007).

  At harvest time in February 2007: Millennium Villages Project, Annual Report for Ruhiira, Uganda, Year 2: February 2007–February 2008 (New York: Millennium Villages Project/UNDP, 2008).

  “Maize is everywhere!”: Tumushabe Boneconcila, quoted in Millennium Villages Project, The Ruhiira Millennium Village Round Up: Testimonies of Success, no. 1 (January 2011).

  Chapter 12. Awaire, Awaire

  where the Millennium Villages Project had so far invested $3.5 million: Internal figures provided to the author by the Millennium Villages Project show that in 2006 and 2007 the project spent a total of $3,491,738 in Ruhiira.

  “I know that if you spend enough money”: Simon Bland, interview by author, 17 January 2007.

  “Sustainability within the Millennium Villages Project”: Millennium Villages Project, “Millennium Villages: Concepts, Sustainability, and Scalability,” draft report, 2007.

  “Rick and I went to see Jeffrey Sachs”: Tom Ryan, interview by author, 7 October 2008.

  The brand book included a list of adjectives: “Ending Extreme Poverty Begins with a Focused Brand,” brand book prepared by Consumer Capital Partners for Millennium Villages Project, 2008.

  “Extreme poverty ends here. It has to”: Nitro Group (now SapientNitro), brochure prepared for Millennium Promise, September 2008.

  “a strategist with a passion”: Personal profile on “Peter Kaye’s Page,” posted to Brand Farm social network, http://thebrandfarm.com/profile/PeterKaye, accessed 3 February 2013.

  “Getting money from USAID and DFID”: Jeffrey Walker, interview by author, 8 September 2009.

  “Today we must proclaim a bold objective”: Henry Kissinger quoted in William Robbins, “U.S. Proposes 3 New Groups on Hunger,” New York Times, 6 November 1974.

  the G8 leaders promised to double aid to Africa: “Highlights of the G8 Communiqué on Africa,” Gleneagles Summit, 8 July 2005.

  “Professor Sachs advises us that we shall get more money”: Ezra Suruma, interview with author, 16 January 2007.

  “Finance Minister of the Year”: “Finance Minister of the Year/Africa: Dr Ezra Suruma, Finance Minister, Uganda,” Banker, 5 January 2009.

  Chapter 13. Capitalist Philanthropy

  “We are capitalists and opportunists”: Roben Farzad, “Can Greed Save Africa?,” Business Week, 10 December 2007 (posted online 29 November 2007).

  “The idea is to create real, rising income”: Rustom Masalawala, interview by author, 13 February 2008.

  “in the hundreds of thousands of dollars”: “Business Plans in the Ruhiira Cluster, Uganda: Ginger Production Business Plan,” draft for Millennium Promise, November 2008.

  Already the WFP was purchasing around $50 million a year: Henri Leturque and Jonathan Mitchell, “WFP’s Agriculture and Market Support (AMS) in Uganda 2009–2014: Mid-Term Evaluation,” strategic evaluation report no. OE/2011/019 prepared
for the World Food Program, October 2011.

  In Toya: Note that there are (at least) two places in Mali named Toya. One is the small Millennium village of Toya in the cercle, or subdivision, of Timbuktu. The other (which appears on Google Maps) is not a village but a larger “commune” in the cercle of Yélimané near Senegal.

  “Rather than sit around waiting for piped water”: Rustom Masalawala, interview by author, 2 November 2008.

  Chapter 14. Setbacks

  “Business Plan for Small-Scale Milk Processing”: Ahmed M. Mohamed and Idris S. Kolon, “Business Plan for Small-Scale Milk Processing and Marketing in Dertu,” revised draft, 16 July 2008.

  “This is the fourth email”: Rustom Masalawala e-mail to Ahmed M. Mohamed, “Re: Farewell,” 15 July 2008.

  “Horn of Africa: Exceptional Food Security Crisis”: International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, “Horn of Africa: Exceptional Food Security Crisis,” Emergency Appeal MDR64003, 11 December 2008.

  “the perfect storm”: Sachs quoted in Jeffrey Gettleman, “Famine Looms as Wars Rend Horn of Africa,” New York Times, 17 May 2008.

  “This is to inform you that the two boreholes in Dertu”: Ahmed M. Mohamed e-mail to Glenn Denning et al., “Break Down of Dertu Borehole,” 7 February 2008.

  “I usually liken boreholes to babies”: Maimbo M. Malesu e-mail to Ahmed M. Mohamed, “Re: Break Down of Dertu Borehole,” 7 February 2008.

  multiple water sources: Alex R. Oduor, Global Water Partnership Associated Programme, “Enhancing Percapita Water Storage at the Dertu Millennium Village, Garissa-Kenya,” report prepared for RELMA-in-ICRAF World Agroforestry Center, Nairobi, 28 February 2006.

  “empower the local community”: Maimbo M. Malesu e-mail to Ahmed M. Mohamed, 7 February 2008.

  $14,000 a month in “profit”: Millennium Villages Project, Annual Report: January 1–December 31, 2008 (New York: Earth Institute, Columbia University, 2009).