Backers of the Millennium Villages Project say their model is successful, and can be replicated across Africa. But critics of their development strategy beg to differ
Jeffrey Sachs is Marmite. Some love him, while others grumble about his high-handedness. But what no one can deny is his extraordinary energy and drive and how he makes things happen. He announced this week at the UN a second and final stage of the Millennium Villages Project (MVP) with another $72m. Not only has George Soros committed his Open Society Foundation to another huge tranche of cash, $47.4m, but Sachs managed to secure the presence of the man himself on the platform with him, along with the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. Sachs is one of the few people who can pull connections across business, politics, global diplomacy and celebrity for the cause of tackling poverty. That is quite an achievement.
The MVP covers more than 500,000 people in 14 villages in different environments across rural Africa, and works on the principle of multiple interventions across health, education, enterprise and agriculture. I visited a project in south-west Uganda, and the results were certainly impressive. The aim is to show how the millennium development goals can be achieved by 2015 with a limited amount of aid that is matched by community investment (in labour or in kind) and the commitment of local and national government.
As part of the announcement this week, the MVP proudly claimed that malaria in its villages had fallen by 72%, access to clean water had more than tripled, and average maize yields had doubled. All of this was achieved on a budget of $60 a head per year, according to the project. The next stage of funding will build on business and enterprise to help villages to link better to the wider market. Soros punched the point of this huge programme home: here was a model that was replicable and could be scaled up across Africa.
But it is on this last point that questions continue to dog the project. Is it replicable and does it really serve as the model for development? The handling of those questions has been pretty brusque. Sachs's UN appearance prompted some digs on Twitter.
Part of the problem is that some of the questions have been put by two very reputable figures in development, Michael Clemens at the Centre for Global Development and Gabriel Demombynes, a senior economist at the World Bank. Yet their carefully argued points have been dismissed as "armchair criticism".
The nub of the issue was well put by Chris Blattman when he asked on his blog what the MVP will prove. That "a gazillion dollars in aid and lots of government attention produces good outcomes"? This is hardly surprising, says Blattman. The point, he adds, is how we test "the theory of the big push: that high levels of aid simultaneously attacking many sectors and bottlenecks are needed to spur development; that there are positive interactions and externalities from multiple interventions".
As Blattman says, the reverse could be true – "that marginal returns to aid may be high at low levels and that we can also have a big impact with smaller sector-specific interventions". There has been plenty of development along the latter lines in recent years, such as mass distribution of malaria bed nets for example. Which is the most effective, sustainable form of aid? It's a very good question.
The problem for the likes of Blattman, Clemens and Demombynes is that, for a number of reasons, the MVP – despite the huge investment of resources, expertise and effort – is not going to help answer the question one way or the other. The evaluation process is simply not rigorous and open enough, argued Clemens 18 months ago in a careful critique that he has repeated more recently.
Clemens urged two things: long term follow-up and comparison with villages in the MVP with other villages, both randomly selected. He argues that many of the places where the MVP villages are sited are undergoing dramatic changes anyway, and that without comparisons, it will be hard to identify what changes are attributable to the project.
The MVP villages are to be evaluated at the end of year five, but no longer than that; for Clemens this timespan was too short. To develop his argument, he refers to a study of a project in China in the late 1990s which followed a village-led development package that similarly tried multiple interventions over five years. At the end of five years, income levels had been significantly boosted, but five years after the project ended, this difference with other villages had disappeared. Despite the massive investment, there was little to show for it.
Clemens argues that, of course, there will be short-term impacts, and that is hardly surprising given that "the size of the intervention is the same order of magnitude as the size of the entire economy of each village; that is, the MVP intervention is roughly 100% of local income per capita".
Since then, Clemens has picked up on several aspects of the MVP report that he says overstates the impacts of the project.
He also criticises the evaluation as inadequate. He has further added that the data is not transparent. Earlier this year, there was a suggestion that Clemens and Sachs were going to discuss their differences of opinion in a public event but, as far as I am aware, that has not yet happened. There was a discussion of some of the issues in Oxford between Demombynes and John MacArthur, one of Sachs's team.
All of this is of particular interest to those of us at the Guardian who were involved in the Katine project from 2007 to 2011. Like the MVP, the project with the NGO Amref took a specific geographical area and followed an approach of multiple interventions.
Amref are completing the four-year project this month, and the question is what has been left behind that will be sustainable and how long the impacts of the project will last. Does this kind of "big bang" approach work?
Any chance of reviving that idea of a public discussion, Jeffrey and Michael?
