Planting a Seed of Self-Sufficiency

Dwarfed by the lush, 12-foot cornstalks sprouting around her hut, Yunia Akinyi Adhola can scarcely believe her good fortune. Never has the maize grown so high here, she said, a guarantee that this year her family won’t go hungry.

Her luck changed a year ago when strangers descended upon this poverty-stricken village, testing the rocky soil, interviewing neighbors and then, to everyone’s delight, giving away fertilizer, high-quality seeds and mosquito nets. A new health clinic is opening on the main dirt road through town.

Like most of the 5,000 inhabitants of Sauri, a cluster of villages nestled in the green hills of western Kenya, Adhola hasn’t a clue what motivated the newcomers to help. She doesn’t know that a year ago the hamlet was plucked from obscurity by a United Nations team to serve as a testing ground for one of the most ambitious poverty-eradication campaigns ever conceived.

Now tiny Sauri stands at the epicenter of a growing international effort to end hunger and preventable disease in the world’s poorest countries.

The bounty Adhola is about to harvest is a happy byproduct of the debate over how rich nations should help the poor, a dispute likely to come to a head at the annual Group of 8 economic summit in Scotland this week.

With much fanfare five years ago, world leaders vowed to achieve sweeping anti-poverty goals by 2015, including halving the number of people living on less than $1 a day, providing primary schooling for all children, halting the spread of AIDS and malaria and reducing child mortality rates by two-thirds.

By 2002, lack of progress toward meeting the goals led U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to launch the Millennium Development Project, led by Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University economics professor and poverty reformer. Sachs’ team is part of a mounting campaign -- including British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Commission for Africa -- to persuade rich countries to double aid to Africa to $50 billion a year. The influx of money, which amounts to about $70 a year for each needy person, would be enough to substantially reduce needless suffering worldwide, proponents say.

“We can achieve this. It’s possible,” Sachs said in an interview. “But we’re not even trying. That’s the real tragedy.”

Critics have dismissed Sachs’ blueprint, outlined in his book “The End of Poverty,” as utopian folly and called Sauri an international publicity stunt.

“It seems like a development Disneyland where planners go to enact their fantasies,” said William Easterly, economics professor at New York University.

But Sachs said he intended to use the village to empirically demonstrate that the Millennium Project goals can be achieved on a smaller scale by 2009, and within a $70-per-person per-year budget.

Mindful that his theories were headed for a showdown at the upcoming G-8 summit, Sachs fast-tracked the Sauri pilot -- the first of 10 planned “Millennium Villages” around the world -- so the improved crops would be planted in time for the June rainy season.

“We wanted to get some results on the ground before the summit,” said Glenn Denning, director of the Millennium Development Goals Center in Nairobi, which is overseeing the Sauri project. “We wanted to be able to say that this is not just theory, not just a bunch of academics sitting around in New York. We’re actually doing it.”

Smiling in her small green forest of cornstalks, Adhola, the mother of seven, said she expected to harvest as many as 10 bags of corn this season, up from the usual three or four.

Asked what she would do with the surplus, Adhola answered quickly that she planned to sell it. As for what she would do with the earnings, the 55-year-old grower appeared stumped. “I’ve never had extra money before,” she said with a smile, adding later that she would probably use the money to pay school fees.

“What we’re doing in this village could be replicated everywhere,” Sachs said.

Remote Sauri is drawing international attention. Politicians, journalists, scientists and gawkers -- from Ugandan members of parliament to Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie -- have traipsed through the village. Residents have complained about the intrusion, and project leaders now ask visitors to arrange their trips at least a month in advance.

Critics question whether Sachs’ vision in Sauri, while admirable, can be rolled out on a large scale.

According to Easterly, similar attempts to inject massive aid into Africa and other poor regions failed in the 1950s and 1960s. Despite receiving $2.3 trillion in international assistance over the last 50 years, underdeveloped nations have little to show for it and Africa has grown even poorer, he said. Billions of dollars disappeared into corrupt or inefficient African governments, never reaching the intended recipients.

“There’s a lot of skepticism about the idea of the Big Plan or doing everything at once,” Easterly said. “If you do everything at once, you can’t tell what worked and what didn’t.”

The Bush administration last week promised to double U.S. aid to Africa over the next five years, but it has expressed skepticism about programs that would significantly increase the commitment.

Sachs rejects the naysayers and insists that his plan shouldn’t be rejected simply because something similar failed more than a generation ago. Past aid campaigns, he said, focused too heavily on short-term relief and not enough on providing developing nations with the tools they need to pull themselves out of the “poverty trap.”

Of the $3 billion spent annually by the United States in Africa, $1 billion is for short-term food aid, $1 billion for combating AIDS and about $400 million on salaries of aid workers and consultants, Sachs said. That leaves only pennies a year per needy person in Africa to provide practical long-term assistance, such as anti-malaria drugs, road and water repairs, or farming supplies.

When Sachs’ team arrived in Sauri, 64% of the townspeople earned less than $1 a day and most endured bouts of hunger because of low crop yields, said Patrick Mutuo, the on-site coordinator for the village. Malaria rates approach 40%, and nearly one-quarter of the villagers have HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, Mutuo said.

Sachs’ game plan for Sauri is simple. His team saturated the depleted soil with about $75,000 worth of fertilizer and gave away hybrid corn seeds that produce double cobs. Each person received a free $7 mosquito net to protect against malaria. Project leaders expanded a school lunch program and persuaded the Kenyan government to repair a broken water pipe and lay an electricity line to the town.

“There’s no rocket science here,” Denning said.

Sachs said the only surprising thing about Sauri was that such proven techniques had not been applied before in a comprehensive manner.

The town’s bumper crop -- expected to be five times last season’s volume -- should go a long way toward ending hunger in Sauri. Community elders predict 80% of the villagers will have enough to eat until the next crop.

Other results, such as reducing malaria and AIDS, will not be measurable for another year.

Though Sachs has committed to not spending more than the prescribed $70 per person over the life of the five-year program, he’s busted his budget for the first year, spending about $100 per person because of start-up costs, such as the new clinic and mosquito nets, Mutuo said. The project will account for the difference by spending less in the final years of the pilot, he said.

Success will depend heavily on involvement of the community, which is expected to make a contribution equivalent to about $10 per person, and the government, which is expected to pony up about $30 per person, according to Sachs’ plan.

In Sauri, for example, residents provided the labor to build the clinic and farmers will be required to donate 10% of their crop yields to the school-meal program. The Kenyan government is expected to equip the clinic and provide expensive antiviral drugs to combat AIDS.

The pilot is grappling with some unexpected challenges. The huge crop has left villagers unprepared to store the corn, and there is concern that the surplus will depress prices.

Because the project started at the tail end of the dry season, when hunger was most severe, some of the villagers sold their free fertilizer and mosquito nets to buy food.

But the reward for those who took the long-term view is vividly apparent along the muddy roads of Sauri. Those who sold their fertilizer or used it incorrectly will be harvesting stunted, wilting stalks of yellow or purple, while those who followed directions will have healthy, tall ones like Adhola’s.

The true test will come after the U.N. leaves Sauri, and villagers must rely on their own knowledge and discipline to sustain the prosperity, Kenyan economist James Shikwati said. He worries that too much outside assistance could stifle homegrown creativity and local enterprise.

“Come back in 10 years, not at the end of five, and see how Sauri is doing,” said Shikwati, executive director of a free-market public policy group called Inter Region Economic Network. “These kinds of approaches create a dependency syndrome. What Africa needs is to save itself, not to look outside for someone to save them.”

In Sauri, leaders vow not to lose the momentum. They’ve formed a committee to ensure that their progress remains on track after the strangers leave and the assistance runs out. One of their first efforts is to build a storage facility for surplus crops.

“We are rising out of poverty,” said Martin Onando, a farmer and Sauri elder. “We had nothing before. We will not go back. When someone escapes hunger, they will do anything to avoid it again.”