by Chris Hughes
Dertu’s “residents” were the poorest people in one of the poorest regions of East Africa, and because of their nomadic lifestyle, some of the hardest to help. Sachs and the Millennium Village team had purposefully chosen to work there because of the challenge it represented. “What we’re talking about here is a community that is barely surviving,” Sachs told the journalist Nina Munk, who wrote a book on his work in the Millennium Villages in 2013. “Violent poverty, natural hazards, conflict, degradation of the environment—objectively speaking, it doesn’t get harder than this.”
The leader of the village, Ahmed Mohamed, walked over to greet us. A tall man with a short beard, he wore a traditional skullcap on his head. Several other village staff, looking joyous and relieved to see us, followed closely behind him. After a brief exchange of courtesies, they led us back to the tarp. As we sat cross-legged on traditional blankets, Ahmed and his team served us a lunch of fresh goat meat from a slaughter earlier in the day in honor of our arrival. They were especially deferential and courteous to Professor Sachs, whom they treated more like royalty than the academic economist I knew him to be. They clearly recognized that he had the power to change their lives.
By the time we finished our meal, word had spread that the mzungu, the white people, had arrived. Several dozen nomads surrounded us, smiling brightly. Only a few of them spoke English, but all of them wanted to catch a glimpse of Professor Sachs. We began our tour of the village just as the midday sun peaked in the sky and the temperature was pushing 100. Standing outside a small building that housed a new health clinic, we heard about the number of childbirths that were happening indoors instead of in the bush. We peered through the window at a sparse but organized dispensary, equipped with all the basics: sanitary gloves, syringes, an eye chart. Nothing was out of place; all appeared freshly cleaned and orderly.
From there, we moved to the dormitories, where the kids slept during the school year. Ahmed had convinced UNICEF to construct the simple buildings by making the case that having a place for children to sleep would encourage the nomadic herders to allow their young kids to stay in Dertu for school. That barracks-like building, which had been completed just the year before, was the boys’ dormitory. My stomach was roiling from the car ride or the goat, or some combination of the two. Desperate for relief from the sun, I peeled off from the group and walked inside, where it was much cooler. I could still hear Ahmed, and no one seemed to notice my absence. Curious to look around, I began to wander a bit on my own.
Something felt off. The clinic we had just seen had seemed a little too perfect, and this room felt a little too clean. I walked down a long aisle of bunk beds, each with a folded blanket atop it, one after another, perfectly ordered. I looked for any sign that people were actually sleeping here—for any trace of the dozens of young boys who in theory lived here year-round. Where were the personal items that schoolkids have, even the poorest of the poor? There were no pencils, no bars of soap, no papers—not even a scrap of clothing. There were no signs of life. It was more like a movie set than a kids’ dorm.
I went back outside and waited for Ahmed to finish speaking. The group peeked into the building through a window and started to move on. I approached Ahmed as we walked. “Where is the stuff?” I asked him quietly. He seemed not to understand. “Where is the kids’ personal stuff? Pencils, books—that kind of thing? There was nothing in the dormitory.”
“We cleaned it before you came,” he replied while nodding. I nodded back and kept walking. It was true—the room had looked recently swept and tidied. Maybe I was wrong, and I just didn’t understand the real depth of poverty in Dertu.
Next up was a small schoolhouse. We learned that the teacher had formerly traveled to nearby pastoralist encampments to teach, but since the dormitories had been built, it was possible for him to centralize his work in Dertu. The classroom was extremely sparse, but it was stocked with basic items—chalk, erasers, books, and simple desks. But yet again, there was no sign of life or the presence of any actual children. The teacher stood at the front of the classroom, smiling and nodding, and told us about how flexible and modern the curriculum was.
We walked down the hall and stopped beside a single computer sitting on a desk behind a grill and padlock protecting it. Professor Sachs turned to me to make sure I was paying attention to the tech part of the tour—had this been prepped especially for me? The teacher told us how miraculous it was that Sony had donated several computers to the school. Ericsson had built a cell phone tower nearby, and thanks to those two gifts, the wealth and knowledge of the entire Internet could be tapped by his students. I was intrigued. I asked, this time in front of the whole group, “Is it the teachers or the kids who use the computers?”
“Both, but mostly the teachers,” the teacher answered.
“What do you use it for?” I asked him.
“Everything. We use it for everything,” he replied.
At first I thought there might just be a breakdown in translation. If you weren’t fluent in English, you might give such a broad and ambiguous answer to a hard question. But both Ahmed and the teacher spoke English well.
I was becoming increasingly suspicious. This computer was literally locked up, even on the day of the tour. The Internet connection, if it had one, would be a slow and unreliable one via the cell phone tower or satellite. Either way, it would make the Internet extremely difficult to use. I loved the idea of nomads in the Somali desert exploring the world through their Google searches, but it seemed nearly unbelievable that an Internet built for the West would be of much day-to-day use to the people here, if it worked at all.
“What kind of things in particular do you do?” I pressed him.
“We use it for all kinds of things.”
“Can you give me an example?” He looked confused, so one of the white Millennium Village program staffers volunteered that they used it for things like “lesson plan development.” I was bordering on obnoxious, but I had come halfway across the world, so I persisted. “What kind of sites or resources do you use for lesson plan development?” I asked the teacher. A look of panic crossed his face.
“We can follow up with that kind of info afterward,” the white staffer interjected once more. Others started to shift uncomfortably, but no one said anything. The tour continued.
When Nina Munk later visited the village, she discovered that the computers had never been connected to the Internet, and all of them were eventually stolen.
The rest of the afternoon was full of similarly upbeat and evasive claims. Everything was going “extremely well,” but nothing seemed right. The Millennium Village felt more and more like a Potemkin Village to me. Finally, after spending just two or three hours in Dertu, we returned to the Land Rovers and departed. I left with more questions than answers, and over the next couple of years, I got them.
Almost from the beginning, the project had been beset by controversy. A series of papers published just after my visit in 2010 called into question the Millennium Village’s marketing materials. Its annual reports claimed “remarkable progress” and cited lower incidences of HIV and malarial infections, lower child mortality rates, and more educational opportunities. But researchers at the Center for Global Development at the World Bank noted that it was impossible to measure the villages’ impact, because there was no “control,” or empirical baseline, to compare it to. Malarial and HIV infection rates had been falling in neighboring villages too, and educational opportunities had been expanded in those places as well. Though Sachs disputed these claims, much of the development community grew skeptical of the project. The lead economist at the World Bank’s development group called Sachs’s assertions of the impact “baffling.” A year later, the director of monitoring and evaluation for the Millennium Villages was forced to resign after he was caught manipulating data to claim that the child mortality rate was decreasing three times faster in Millennium
Villages than it was in Kenya as a whole.
Five years after the project began in Dertu, despite millions of dollars of corporate and government philanthropy, Dertu had no paved roads, electricity, or running water. Its latrines were full; garbage was piled high. The members of the community filed a 14-point complaint with the local member of parliament. Sachs raised an additional $70 million to extend his project in some of the other villages, but the Millennium Villages website says that work in Dertu was “completed” in 2011. And yet for all that, the project’s 2010 annual report claimed a “stunning transformation of 500,000 lives.”
The Millennium Villages have been one of the most expensive and troubled interventions in Africa, yet the nonprofit behind the villages, Millennium Promise, has a three-star rating (out of four possible) on Charity Navigator, a website that helps donors make informed decisions about which nonprofits to support. Over the past decade, Millennium Promise has raised nearly $200 million. Its branding book provides guidelines for how to present its logo, and its annual report and website show smiling faces, positive statistics, and specific results. It looks and feels like just about every other nonprofit brochure you have seen. Looking at it from the outside, you would have no idea how ineffective and discredited the model is. The failure of the Millennium Village Project was not because Professor Sachs and the team didn’t have the best of intentions. It’s hard not to be humbled by their dedication to the cause; they are some of the most driven, caring, and generous people on the planet. But good intentions and the smartest of expert interventions alone are not enough to transform lives.
The Millennium Villages came to represent for me an approach to combating economic injustice and poverty that was about engineering progress from the top down, rather than respecting the agency and autonomy of the people you set out to empower. In this approach, foreign experts assume that interventions as simple and superficially laudable as digging a well or building a school will improve the lives of the people they are meant to serve. But every culture and place presents unique and often hidden challenges, and a lot of money and energy can be wasted quickly. An expert’s plan hatched in Nairobi or New York might sound good and look attractive to a donor in a colorful brochure, but that doesn’t mean it will work or improve people’s lives thousands of miles away.
To be clear, some of the other Millennium Villages fared better than Dertu. The second village in Kenya, called Sauri, has produced more meaningful results: increased agricultural output, more children in school, and fewer people infected with malaria. Aid interventions can occasionally work, but the question is, at what cost? What else could we be funding with those dollars? If we could help and empower the poor more effectively and more cheaply, why wouldn’t we? I began to wonder if a different kind of approach that embraces the decision-making power of the beneficiaries and invests in them directly might not only be more respectful of the communities served, but more impactful. As a person looking to invest every dollar as effectively as possible, this seemed to me to be the most important and urgent question to ask.
In the year after that trip to Kenya, I began work on a nonprofit start-up called Jumo. Our goal was to help nonprofits in the United States and around the globe publicize their work and connect with new donors and volunteers. We created a social network for causes, and 5,000 nonprofits signed up. As we built the network, I began to feel that we were playing the role of a marketing channel for the charities, which had nothing to do with how effective they might be. Unlike in the private sector, where a store owner knows she’s doing well when a lot of people buy her goods, nonprofits don’t have the same feedback loop. The number of donations that come in is not necessarily correlated with the quality of work the charity is doing, but instead is tied to how well the nonprofit leaders sell their causes.
Marketing science manipulates well-intentioned potential donors by telling them that their gifts will be matched or by showing a heart-wrenching photo of a child with a fly on her nose. The charities are not doing anything wrong—over time, they have developed a playbook to convert sympathy into contributions. Those donations pay their bills. But the natural result of this structure is that organizations put more and more emphasis on effective fund-raising, and less emphasis on assessing whether the programs they are administering are effective. Few nonprofit groups invest the time and resources to have independent third parties verify their impact. My lesson from the Millennium Villages in Dertu was to never assume that good intentions mean real impact, even if the people at work are sincere and knowledgeable.
Without realizing it at first, I had created in Jumo yet another marketing channel for charities to sell themselves, when what I should have been doing was finding a better way to assess their effectiveness. I quickly became disillusioned and decided to merge Jumo into another online network. I began to focus more narrowly on the question of how I could invest the wealth that was still building from Facebook into a cause that I could be sure would have an impact. I was on the hunt for something verifiably helpful—something that didn’t just make for good marketing.
Late one evening, I discovered several blog posts on the website of a group called GiveWell that one of its founders had written during a trip to India. I knew the author, Holden Karnofsky, because he and his colleague Elie Hassenfeld had sublet a few desks in our shared office space a year earlier. Before starting GiveWell, Elie and Holden had been associates at Bridgewater, one of the largest hedge funds in the world. Their challenge was similar to mine: they wanted to use the same rigorous methods they had used to evaluate a financial opportunity for their hedge fund to assess the charities they were considering donating to. “We scoured the Internet, but couldn’t find the answers to our questions, either through charities’ own websites or through the foundations that fund them,” they wrote when they started GiveWell. They made it their mission to do research and due diligence for themselves and other donors on how to make their giving as impactful as it could possibly be.
One of the blog posts I read that night offered a short and pithy reflection on the age-old question that many of us have struggled with at some point: Should I give money to a person begging in the street? Holden had gone to India and, in the face of rampant poverty and homelessness, found himself wondering if he should just pass out money. On my first trip to India years before, dozens of children, no more than five or six years old, had encircled me, tapping my legs and hands. Their plaintive, unwashed faces and persistent requests for “chapatti, chapatti, chapatti,” the word for a simple bread, had never left me. “Here, more than in NYC,” Holden wrote, “I could arguably carry out a mini ‘cash transfer’ program on my own. The question is whether I should.” His provocation stuck in my head.
Holden’s question of whether he could run his own “cash transfer” program, shorthand for just giving people cash directly, wasn’t just a passing curiosity. The GiveWell team and he felt a responsibility to investigate what it would mean to do exactly that, just as they ran down every single other way of giving to assess its impact. As GiveWell grew, it became an anchor for the “effective altruism” movement, a philanthropic approach moving away from pull-the-heartstrings inspiration and toward empirical, transparent, and rigorous evaluation of impact. The Princeton philosopher Peter Singer pioneered this utilitarian approach to philanthropy, and not without controversy. “By donating a relatively small amount of money, you could save a child’s life,” he writes in The Life You Can Save. “Maybe it takes more than the amount needed to buy a pair of shoes—but we all spend money on things we don’t really need, whether on drinks, meals out, clothing, movies, concerts, vacations, new cars, or house renovation. Is it possible that by choosing to spend your money on such things rather than contributing to an aid agency, you are leaving a child to die, a child you could have saved?” Singer, GiveWell, and the effective altruism movement are in pursuit of a practical ethics that seeks not just to give away money, but to rethink our c
ollective responsibility to one another and create a tradition in philanthropy focused on maximizing the return of each dollar invested.
Holden’s post only came to tentative initial conclusions, but I marveled at the simplicity of the idea of giving cash directly. My curiosity grew over the course of weeks and then months. Why was my default to trust an educated outsider or nonprofit executive with resources rather than the poor themselves? The radical, irreverent nature of the idea that the poor might know the best way to solve their own problems hit a nerve. It connected to my natural skepticism of people in power that my parents had inculcated in me from a young age and which had only grown with exposure to the professional nonprofit infrastructure I had witnessed in places like Dertu. What if the most effective way to help somebody might be to get all those experts intent on over-engineering progress out of the way?
A couple years later, I found myself back in Kenya for another predawn trip into the bush. The day before, I had flown from New York to London, from London to Nairobi, and from Nairobi to the city of Kisumu. Despite being only seven miles from the equator, the mountain air that morning was crisp and cool. This time there was no caravan outside the hotel—just a single white van. I jumped in and joined the half-dozen other passengers, who worked for a nonprofit called GiveDirectly. I sat in the first row, and GiveDirectly’s CEO Michael Faye, a brown-haired, wiry man in his thirties, sat beside me. We set out on a two-hour ride to a group of villages near a town called Siaya.
An hour into the trip, the van popped a tire. We pulled over to the side of the road and filed out one by one. We all milled about awkwardly while the driver hauled out a spare and the equipment to change the tire. The swap did not look like it was going to happen quickly. Michael, uninterested in wasting time on such an important day, took a few steps away in frustration. Shuffling about, he turned around and looked at the group. “Should we just rent motorbikes for the last 20 miles?” he asked. “We’d probably get there faster anyway, and we could see more.”