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

Dorian Gray, NGO critic

Apologies in advance for a straight-up self-indulgent and frivolous post. So I'm currently reading The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (nice counterpoint to following international development blogs and source of endless fantastically enigmatic quotes for hypothetical dinner parties). And it turns out, despite his self-professed superficiality (the guy basically trades his soul away to keep his incredible Greek-god level beauty - one lover of his: “The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.”), he is an astute commentator on the contradictions of the international NGO apparatus. Who knew? Granted if my source of cutting, up-to-date analysis of development issues is a novel written in 1890 it is not worth your time reading it. But the irony of a guy who rejects anything moral or 'deep' serving up a classic commentary on the paradox of big-D Development was too much for me to resist just this once. So here you go (no spoilers by the way):

Dorian Gray to Basil Hallward, his friend and creator of the painting of Dorian which gets old and disgusting as he morally decays in order that he can keep his wonderful youth:

"You remind me of a story Harry told me about a certain philanthropist who spent twenty years of his life in trying to get some grievance redressed, or some unjust law altered -- I forget exactly what it was. Finally he succeeded, and nothing could exceed his disappointment. He had absolutely nothing to do, almost died of ennui, and became a confirmed misanthrope"

What Dorian actually means here: In a nutshell, many development NGOs are set up to run projects in a developing country and achieve some outcome like improvements in education or enabling people to escape poverty. But a by-product of success (or the realisation that it actually makes more sense to just employ someone local who is infinitely better equipped to do the job than a well-meaning white, middle-class expat) is that there is no longer any reason for said NGO to exist (at least in the form of predominantly expat-staffed). But that means all of us lovely people in the global North who want to work in Development are out of a job (boo). So faced with this basic contradiction, instead of taking Gray's philanthropist's option of retiring bitterly, probably to become a bloodsucking banker (those are the only two options right?), many NGOs have reinvented themselves as intermediaries in the aid-chain to keep their relevance (classic justification being that they are more flexible, closer to the grass-roots and innovative than big bulky donors thus better vehicles for partnerships with Southern NGOs). Or others just carry on doing an implementation job which is less efficient than letting local people/organisations do the same thing. And others still carve out another niche, maybe bringing relevant actors together to facilitate change or highlighting the needs of the poor, Oxfam-style.

Basically what Dorian is trying to say here more generally is that there is often a fundamental disjuncture between the desire to help and the actual need for us development workers (aspirational in my case). Which is a common idea, highlighted by people like Angus Deaton most recently. Fortunately for me, I don't buy into this view, that there is little or no need for the activities of the development 'sector'; it just means that we have to make sure that we keep questioning the value of what we do and ensure that the results for the 'beneficiaries' of the work are always put first. Ed Carr offers one defence of why it is fundamentally good and useful to work in development (crucially, given the right skills and the right programme, see HowMatters on this). So we are not doomed to 'die of ennui' for a lack of development work, fortunately.

Next week, how to deliver structural economic transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa using quotes from Romeo and Juliet.