Socio-Economic Development
Ideas

Nina Munk on Her New Book: Can “Bono’s Africa Guru” Jeffrey Sachs Truly End Poverty?

Burgess COMMENTARY
5:00 PM, SEPTEMBER 20 2013 Nina Munk on Her New Book: Can “Bono’s Africa Guru” Jeffrey Sachs Truly End Poverty? by Bruce Handy COMMENT 2 EMAIL COPYRIGHT NINA MUNK. Nina Munk with schoolchildren in Ruhiira, Uganda. Nina Munk’s new book, The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty, is both a tragicomedy and a genuine tragedy, a fascinating portrait of an innovative thinker as well as a fair-minded examination of his methods. It’s also a testament to the enduring value of old-fashioned, shoe-leather reporting—it should be read not just in policy circles but also at J-schools. Sachs, an academic turned activist, is the Columbia University economist who became famous as the author of the 2005 best-seller The End of Poverty and even more famous as “Bono’s guru”—the man who has helped midwife the singer’s efforts to fight poverty in Africa. Angelina Jolie and Madonna are also acolytes. In Sachs’s view, Africa’s problems can be solved relatively “easily” (a word not often used in this context) if rich nations would only supply the money and will power—and, of course, follow Sachs’s prescriptions. To that end, in 2005, he launched what he called the Millennium Villages Project, through which a handful of desperately poor, isolated villages across sub-Saharan Africa became living laboratories for Sachs’s ambitious theories on sustainable development. “What we’re trying to show is that with just a few interventions and not a lot of money, lives can be transformed,” Sachs once explained. “It’s what MTV would call Extreme Village Makeover.” Munk, a V.F. contributing editor, first wrote about Sachs in the magazine’s Africa issue, in 2007. She spent the next six years returning to Africa to follow the progress at two Millennium Villages: Dertu, in Kenya’s arid North Eastern Province, near its troubled border with Somalia, and Ruhiira, tucked away in the highlands of southwestern Uganda. It will probably come as no surprise that “interventions” that made sense in theory didn’t always translate on the ground. I spoke with Munk about the book—highlights from our chat: Bruce Handy: To me, the biggest question the book raises—aside from what can be done to fight extreme poverty—is to what extent Sachs believes his rhetoric about how straightforward the solutions are, and to what extent that’s a sales pitch to convince billionaires and movie stars to open their pockets. Nina Munk: Sachs has a genius for taking problems that are enormously complicated and simplifying the hell out of them. That’s a useful skill whether you’re advertising razors or toothpaste or the end of poverty. And that talent has, happily, helped move the issue of global poverty into the mainstream. But in reality, the causes of poverty are so complicated, the solutions to poverty are so complicated, and Africa is so complicated. And the danger is that, in the long run, simplification ends up feeding the cynicism and disillusionment people feel about these issues. It’s a problem not limited to Jeffrey Sachs—a lot of nonprofits and NGOs are guilty of it. Sachs criticizes a lot of anti-poverty efforts as mere charity as opposed to sustainable economic development. But the specific “interventions” you write about don’t seem to have added up to anything particularly sustainable. The tragedy is that we really don’t know how to “end poverty.” Well, there’s always been poverty—it will always be with us to some extent, no? Yes, you’re absolutely right. The truth is, for all the hundreds of billions of dollars we’ve spent on foreign aid, we just don’t know how people are lifted out of poverty. We know that economic growth plays a really important role, and that China, for example, has managed to lift enormous numbers of people out of poverty because its economy has grown at such a rapid pace. But the exact mechanics of it, the secret formula for growth—which government policies or social programs or business investments really make the difference—that’s the $64,000 question. The Ugandan village I reported from is in the middle of nowhere. It can take days to get to there. There are no paved roads, no electricity, no running water. People are living in conditions that, in the developed world, we haven’t seen in centuries. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Sachs and his team, hoping to create an economy from scratch, introduced fertilizer and high-yield seeds in this village so that people could grow and sell cash crops: spices, tomatoes, corn, soybeans. It was a fine idea. But then it became clear that there was no way to get these crops to market, because there is no market—because there are no roads, and no one in his right mind is going to drive two days up into these hills to load up his truck with a low-profit crop and then drive back for two days and puncture his tires all along the way. Economically speaking, it just doesn’t make sense. Economically speaking, these places can appear to be hopeless. You could argue—and people have—that there is no good reason for anyone to be living in these places. On top of that, there are cultural issues. One of the most telling moments in your book is when a project supervisor in a Kenyan village is trying to convince the livestock farmers to cut wild grass to feed their animals and they refuse, saying, No, this is God’s grass, not ours. We try to impose our ideas and our view of the world on faraway places—the arrogance of that can be breathtaking. Part of the problem is the inflated rhetoric surrounding foreign aid. If you say, I care deeply about the world’s poor and I’d like to help in some way—I’m going to make a thoughtful financial contribution to a well-run organization that feeds schoolchildren, provides vaccinations or mosquito nets, or helps fund small businesses—and you understand your objective clearly within the confines of charity, as alms, then you can make a tremendous difference in the lives of many people. You can’t spend any time in Africa and not be moved and impressed by the impact of aid—Mary’s Meals and Heifer International, to name just two groups that I support, are doing very important work. But if you believe your aid is going to win hearts and minds, end terrorism, change the course of a nation’s history, and singlehandedly thrust people into the global economy, you’re doomed to failure. What’s the best case that can be made for the Millennium Villages? If Jeff Sachs’s goal was to offer a helping hand to a dozen African villages, his project can be considered a success. If you pour 5 million or 10 million dollars into a very small, isolated village in the middle of sub-Saharan Africa, you’re going to have a tremendous impact. No question about it. And in most of the Millennium Villages that impact is clearly visible. Children are better fed. More people attend school. There are nurses where there were none before. Fewer people are dying of malaria. You can see the impact. It’s impressive. But Jeff Sachs’s goal was not simply to improve the lives of a few thousand rural Africans. His goal was far more ambitious: to find the solution to poverty; to create a model for lasting economic development that would be rolled out all across the continent. The question now is what happens when Millennium Villages Project comes to an end, any day now, and the flow of money stops. Where will the villages be in 10 years? Connected to the global economy? Or still be trapped in extreme poverty?

I have been in and out of developing countries since the 1970s. The measure I use for performance is the relationship between what should have been accomplished versus what actually was accomplished ... and using this metric, I find the performance of the development community has been quite pathetic.

So the next question is what intervention or change in practice would have brought about the most improvement relative to the money invested. If I had had a lot more power in this arena I would have done a lot more to stop the leakage of big amounts of money from legitimate projects into all sorts of inappropriate channels that made the rich and powerful even more rich and more powerful. Much of this could have been done simply by using old fashioned accountancy, and taking the results seriously.

I would also have made more use of management tools ... not tools of administration which are different and essentially quite useless for practical project implementation. Data are a part of good management, but the least data to make good decisions and not data simply for data's sake ... which seems to have been the Millennium Village model. There should have been more accounting type analysis and much less macro-economic analysis ... much more understanding and appreciation of practical issues that were impacting people. Many problems had technical (engineering) components that could be solved with a decent set of workshop tools and not needing any economic analysis.

My views were never popular inside the development community, for obvious reasons, and it did not help my career. However, I have not seen anything yet that makes me feel the need to change my basic conclusions.

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Nina Munk on Her New Book: Can “Bono’s Africa Guru” Jeffrey Sachs Truly End Poverty?

IMAGE ... Nina Munk with schoolchildren in Ruhiira, Uganda.

Nina Munk’s new book, The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty, is both a tragicomedy and a genuine tragedy, a fascinating portrait of an innovative thinker as well as a fair-minded examination of his methods. It’s also a testament to the enduring value of old-fashioned, shoe-leather reporting—it should be read not just in policy circles but also at J-schools.

Sachs, an academic turned activist, is the Columbia University economist who became famous as the author of the 2005 best-seller The End of Poverty and even more famous as “Bono’s guru”—the man who has helped midwife the singer’s efforts to fight poverty in Africa. Angelina Jolie and Madonna are also acolytes. In Sachs’s view, Africa’s problems can be solved relatively “easily” (a word not often used in this context) if rich nations would only supply the money and will power—and, of course, follow Sachs’s prescriptions. To that end, in 2005, he launched what he called the Millennium Villages Project, through which a handful of desperately poor, isolated villages across sub-Saharan Africa became living laboratories for Sachs’s ambitious theories on sustainable development. “What we’re trying to show is that with just a few interventions and not a lot of money, lives can be transformed,” Sachs once explained. “It’s what MTV would call Extreme Village Makeover.”

Munk, a V.F. contributing editor, first wrote about Sachs in the magazine’s Africa issue, in 2007. She spent the next six years returning to Africa to follow the progress at two Millennium Villages: Dertu, in Kenya’s arid North Eastern Province, near its troubled border with Somalia, and Ruhiira, tucked away in the highlands of southwestern Uganda. It will probably come as no surprise that “interventions” that made sense in theory didn’t always translate on the ground. I spoke with Munk about the book—highlights from our chat:

Bruce Handy: To me, the biggest question the book raises—aside from what can be done to fight extreme poverty—is to what extent Sachs believes his rhetoric about how straightforward the solutions are, and to what extent that’s a sales pitch to convince billionaires and movie stars to open their pockets.

Nina Munk: Sachs has a genius for taking problems that are enormously complicated and simplifying the hell out of them. That’s a useful skill whether you’re advertising razors or toothpaste or the end of poverty. And that talent has, happily, helped move the issue of global poverty into the mainstream. But in reality, the causes of poverty are so complicated, the solutions to poverty are so complicated, and Africa is so complicated. And the danger is that, in the long run, simplification ends up feeding the cynicism and disillusionment people feel about these issues. It’s a problem not limited to Jeffrey Sachs—a lot of nonprofits and NGOs are guilty of it.

Sachs criticizes a lot of anti-poverty efforts as mere charity as opposed to sustainable economic development. But the specific “interventions” you write about don’t seem to have added up to anything particularly sustainable.

The tragedy is that we really don’t know how to “end poverty.”

Well, there’s always been poverty—it will always be with us to some extent, no?

Yes, you’re absolutely right. The truth is, for all the hundreds of billions of dollars we’ve spent on foreign aid, we just don’t know how people are lifted out of poverty. We know that economic growth plays a really important role, and that China, for example, has managed to lift enormous numbers of people out of poverty because its economy has grown at such a rapid pace. But the exact mechanics of it, the secret formula for growth—which government policies or social programs or business investments really make the difference—that’s the $64,000 question.

The Ugandan village I reported from is in the middle of nowhere. It can take days to get to there. There are no paved roads, no electricity, no running water. People are living in conditions that, in the developed world, we haven’t seen in centuries. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Sachs and his team, hoping to create an economy from scratch, introduced fertilizer and high-yield seeds in this village so that people could grow and sell cash crops: spices, tomatoes, corn, soybeans. It was a fine idea. But then it became clear that there was no way to get these crops to market, because there is no market—because there are no roads, and no one in his right mind is going to drive two days up into these hills to load up his truck with a low-profit crop and then drive back for two days and puncture his tires all along the way. Economically speaking, it just doesn’t make sense. Economically speaking, these places can appear to be hopeless. You could argue—and people have—that there is no good reason for anyone to be living in these places.

On top of that, there are cultural issues. One of the most telling moments in your book is when a project supervisor in a Kenyan village is trying to convince the livestock farmers to cut wild grass to feed their animals and they refuse, saying, No, this is God’s grass, not ours.

We try to impose our ideas and our view of the world on faraway places—the arrogance of that can be breathtaking. Part of the problem is the inflated rhetoric surrounding foreign aid. If you say, I care deeply about the world’s poor and I’d like to help in some way—I’m going to make a thoughtful financial contribution to a well-run organization that feeds schoolchildren, provides vaccinations or mosquito nets, or helps fund small businesses—and you understand your objective clearly within the confines of charity, as alms, then you can make a tremendous difference in the lives of many people. You can’t spend any time in Africa and not be moved and impressed by the impact of aid—Mary’s Meals and Heifer International, to name just two groups that I support, are doing very important work. But if you believe your aid is going to win hearts and minds, end terrorism, change the course of a nation’s history, and singlehandedly thrust people into the global economy, you’re doomed to failure.

What’s the best case that can be made for the Millennium Villages?

If Jeff Sachs’s goal was to offer a helping hand to a dozen African villages, his project can be considered a success. If you pour 5 million or 10 million dollars into a very small, isolated village in the middle of sub-Saharan Africa, you’re going to have a tremendous impact. No question about it. And in most of the Millennium Villages that impact is clearly visible. Children are better fed. More people attend school. There are nurses where there were none before. Fewer people are dying of malaria. You can see the impact. It’s impressive.

But Jeff Sachs’s goal was not simply to improve the lives of a few thousand rural Africans. His goal was far more ambitious: to find the solution to poverty; to create a model for lasting economic development that would be rolled out all across the continent. The question now is what happens when Millennium Villages Project comes to an end, any day now, and the flow of money stops. Where will the villages be in 10 years? Connected to the global economy? Or still be trapped in extreme poverty?