A trip to Ruhiira and the Millennium Villages Project: undoing (?) and redoing (?) cynicism

I felt awkward waiting at the Millennium Villages Project offices in Mbarara on a Monday morning, waiting to join the UN convoy on its way to Ruhiira: they were here because they had things to do, me because I was a white person who’d read a book by Jeff Sachs and wanted to see his brainchild development project in the flesh. Although we were mostly ignored to be honest, as the MVP staff milled around and chatted over mandazi and chai. It turns out they receive visits about three days a week so I shouldn’t have been surprised. We arrived at the Ruhiira office, cold and slightly bewildered, while the most of the convoy passengers piled into a small room for their weekly meeting.

The Millennium Villages Project (MVP), in a nutshell, is a development project run in (initially) 10 sites in 10 countries in Africa. The strategy is ‘integrated rural development,’ or doing many things (health, livelihoods, agriculture, sanitation etc.) at once, with the aim of achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). And not only to achieve the MDGs, but to unleash a cycle of self-sustaining economic growth: Sachs’ idea is that undeveloped areas suffer from one or more of a number of ‘traps’ and once you get them out of these traps, they can ‘climb the ladder of development’ on their own. Out of the trap, up the ladder, you’re sorted.

Snakes and ladders for maternal health

Obviously, Sachs has come in for a lot of criticism over MVP, most recently sparked by Nina Munk’s ‘The Idealist’. A cursory listen to a podcast about the book (no time for reading) quickly shows where she stands on Sachs/MVP with phrases like “this was neither sustainable nor was it scalable,” “the terrible tragedy of this project...” “Jeff Sachs... cruelly disappointed and harmed the people he supposedly set out to help”. Her basic point was that the project didn’t bring lasting, sustainable change. Clearly if you throw money at a community, there’s likely to be some return, and maybe even a very good return, but Sachs grand, top-down plan failed, and those returns won’t be there for the grandchildren of the people of Ruhiira. Jeff Sachs, on a later podcast, rebutted all of the above, and in doing so showed why people call him manipulative and arrogant. Listen just to hear academics argue like schoolkids. Anyway, all this was in my head when we arrived.

So, was this a locally-integrated, locally-owned and sustainable initiative? Or was it a classic uber-development project, UN 4x4s, logframes, distortion and the rest? Well there were no expats, at least, but those working there that we met didn’t seem to be from this part of Uganda: Shaquilla, head of communications, was from the east of the country, and had previously worked for UNDP in Kampala for example. References to the Ruhiira district as ‘the field,’ giving figures in dollars not Ugandan shillings and the stereotypical orange ‘African’ sun on the background to the introductory presentation were also jarring. More worrying than symbolic things are claims that partnerships of local artisans with Tommy Hilfiger or farmers with the World Food Programme are signs of organic, locally-driven development, or a model that can be scaled up. When in fact it's massive external distortion. On the other, locally-owned, hand, when we asked Lawrence, responsible for education, what was the first thing MVP did when going into new schools, he answered ‘asking the community what they wanted changed’; on the agriculture side, we were also told that local tree-growers had ignored MVP’s advice about growing leguminous trees to replenish the soils and had gone for eucalyptus instead, for more cash return. There’s also a community radio providing an outlet for views and concerns.

The Ruhiira project office

When I was there though, these debates about sustainability left me cold. During the presentation we were given, we heard the following facts, among others: proportion of population below extreme poverty line ($1/day) reduced from 58% in 2006 to 10 % in 2011; access to clean water increased from 8% to 42%; prevalence of malaria reduced from 17% to less than 1%; health staff increased from 10 personnel to 60 staff including 2 medical doctors and 20 midwives. I could go on. Away from the stats, we visited Robert, a farmer: with MVP’s support he now has biogas production, cross-breed cattle, a silage pit for the cattle, and coffee and banana plantations. He’s also been promised a cooler at a 50% subsidy so that the cooperative he’s a part of can start selling milk on a larger scale. You kind of see where Sachs exasperation with the mauling he gets from the ‘development bubble’ comes from: ‘look! These people here are doing much better/are not dead because of this project!’ Surely all the rest is just cynicism?

Biogas pit: where cow dung becomes energy

But the question is not whether outsiders with loads of money can make things better (they obviously can), it’s whether they can help local people make things better for themselves in the long term. And when James, head of agriculture, remarks that there’s been a massive population influx to the area caused directly by the project, you have your doubts as to whether the ‘success’ being enjoyed currently isn’t going to fade away or even reverse when the money dries up. MVP is currently ‘handing over’ to local government to continue the work, and the government is implementing new MVP pilots in other parts of Uganda. But if the project only works as long as money is being pumped in, government take-up doesn’t really mean anything apart from that it’s been persuaded to divert budget from wherever it was formerly directing it to where Jeff Sachs has suggested it be directed to.

But ambivalence, yes, as suggested by the number of sentences starting with ‘but’ in this post. When we left Ruhiira trading centre, we passed concrete buildings, power lines and water tanks that people really appreciated and which didn’t exist before MVP. Robert’s wife told us that for her, “MVP is of great importance”. Who am I, a middle-class kid from London, to say any different?

Further reading/listening:

Nina Munk on her book 'The Idealist', on EconTalk and on Development Drums

Jeff Sachs defending MVP on EconTalk
MVP website

Criticism of MVP's evaluation strategy by Michael Clemens

FACTS! Or why I should have studied engineering

So one of my abiding worries with my degree (basically Politics and Spanish) is that I fear that I will finish it without actually knowing anything new in any tangible sense. No matter how many times I tell myself "it's the transferable skills Charlie! The transferable skills!" the fact that I'm basically no better off knowledge-wise than a person who has the Guardian as their internet homepage is slightly disconcerting. One of the things I do to combat this anguish is to learn 'facts'. Here are some of the facts on topics about global development/poverty/health/inequity which I have accumulated, along with (often not original) sources. Some are 'classics'; others will perhaps surprise. In any case, in no particular order, enjoy:

1. Worldwide, maternal and child mortality both nearly halved between 1990 and 2012.
(Development Progress)

2. The global cost of containing violence or dealing with its consequences reached a staggering $9.5 trillion (11% of global GDP) in 2012.
(UN Dispatch)

3. Close to half of all international migrants settle in the developing world, including 10 percent in Africa.
(Washington Post)

4. Globally, deaths from tobacco use each year exceed the number of deaths from HIV/AIDs, TB, and malaria combined.
(Center for Global Development)

5. It is estimated that women in the Global South spend a cumulative 200 million hours a day collecting water.
(Think Africa Press)

6. An estimated $18.5 trillion is stashed in offshore tax havens. That’s $3 trillion more than the gross domestic product of the United States.
(Oxfam, Working for the Few)

7. One study finds that potatoes may have been responsible for 12% of the global increase in population between 1700 and 1900.
(Banerjee and Duflo, Poor Economics)

8. The net fiscal balance of overall immigration to the UK between 2001 and 2011 amounts therefore to a positive net contribution of about £25 billion, over a period over which the UK has run an overall budget deficit (both EEA and non-EEA).
(Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration)

9. The Uganda Demographic and Health Survey found that 39 per cent, more than one in three, women and girls aged 15-49 had experienced sexual violence during their lifetime.
(Amnesty)

10. From 1980 to 2008 in USA, the bottom 90% of taxpayers saw their inflation-adjusted pre-tax incomes grow for total increase of 1.9%. For the top 1%, it increased 2.35 times.
(Angus Deaton, The Great Escape)

11. To ‘top up’ the incomes of the 800m people worldwide living on less than $1 day would require the adults of Britain, France, Germany, Japan, USA to give $0.15 a day.
(Angus Deaton, The Great Escape)

12. Between 2005 and 2009, the typical African American in the USA lost 53% of her wealth.
(Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality)

13. World GDP per capita doubled to $180 between 15 000 years ago and 1750 AD, then in the following 250 years increased 37-fold.
(Eric Beinhocker, The Origin of Wealth)

14. 72% of the world's poor live in middle income countries.
(Owen Barder)

15. 59% of the variance in people's income can be explained by the country in which they live.
(Michael Clemens on Development Drums) 

A nice fact-based video on progress in global health from Development Progress; Video credit: Development Progress

ps. there's no such thing as an objective fact