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.
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| 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.
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| 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?
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| 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:
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