What I Did on My Summer Vacation: I Went to Africa

Again and again from business leaders and philantnropists I’ve heard, Don’t wait for the government I’ll help you.

It bears repeating: Extreme poverty is the best breeding ground on earth for disease, instability and terrorism.

Have any children died recently? I asked the chief And I'll never forget his response. He waved his hand in violent disgust "So many! So many!"

This summer, from June to August, my family and I took a trip. My daughter Hannah, who is ten, can now reel off the itinerary from memory: China, Tajikistan, Israel, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Libya, England, Ghana, Mali, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Rwanda, Malawi, Indonesia, Cambodia. In these places, we spent most of our time in villages.

Throughout the world, the poor by and large live in villages. Thousands and thousands of villages. The fact of the matter is that these villages are communities of people who want out of poverty, who want their children to get out of poverty. They know they’re poor. And they know the whole world is not poor and that they’re stuck in a situation they doj’t wafit to be stuck in. That’s the core concept of the Millennium Villages Project, which a few colleagues from the UN’s Millennium Project and the Earth Institute at i I started about a year ago.

Now, the basic ideas for how a poor village can be developed have been known for a long time among different groups of practitioners—those who grow food, and those who fight disease, and those who manage water supplies. What the Millennium Project does is bring these different groups together, because villages don’t live only on farming or only on water or only on clinics. They live as whole communities that will get out of poverty wholly. If children are eating better because farmers are growing more food, it’s going to improve the health of the children. Obviously, it will take the burden off the clinics. If the children are healthy, they are going to be in school. And they’re goingto be learning. If the children are in school, they’re going to be the ones who will bring new ideas and new technologies to the community, so it’s all mutually reinforcing.

My colleagues and I took a stand in our work several years ago that we would not look for the magic bullet, because there is none. These are just basic problems requiringbasic work. Nothing magic about it. The strategy follows from that basic idea, but the idea of approaching this on a villageby-village basis came about accidentally.

Officialdom the world over is pretty slow moving, pretty impractical, and pretty dam frustrating in many ways, so even when the proof of these concepts is clear, actually getting things done is not so easy. You need a little bit of money, and donors seem utterly capable of spending it on themselves, on salaries of consultants, on meetings and seminars and workshops, but not on actually helping people not starve to death in villages. Too much of our aid money goes after an emergency comes, in shipping food aid instead of helping the farmers grow food, just as too much of it goes to razing and rebuilding a city rather than fortifying levees in advance of a disaster. Think of it as a smart investment: We can pay now or pay later. And it’s a lot cheaper to pay now, and the return is incalculable. Yet this stuff doesn’t actually get done, and that’s why people are hungry, and that’s why they’re unable to access safe drinking water, and that’s why they’re dying by the millions.

Editor's note:The author is director of both the Earth Institute at Columbia University and the UN Millennium Project. He was profiled in the Best and Brightest issue in 200B and is too modest to say that in fact he is leading a green revolution in Africa that will help rescue the starving continent. Quite a summer vacation.

It’s not very satisfactory to see this and not act. And so in the last couple of years I’ve started to talk about these problems with business leaders and philanthropists, and over and over again I’ve heard the same response: Don’t wait for the government. I’ll help you. So what kind of accidentally dawned on us was that we could j ust go ahead and get these concepts proven on the ground. And that’s what we are doing. And many philanthropists have come forward now and said, We’ll give you some backing; show us what you can do.

The other day I was talking to the CEO of a major American corporation, a man who understands first and foremost the value of a good investment, and I was describing this effort to him, and he got it immediately. I hadn’t even finished talking when he blurted out, “Sign me up for two villages!”

Our first village in Kenya, called Sauri, is actually a cluster of eight villages in what they call a sublocation in western Kenya, a very hungry, very disease-ridden, very isolated, extremely impoverished community. And it’s a community that some of my colleagues knew because they had been analyzing the soils there and in nearby communities for many years. A colleague from Columbia University, Pedro Sanchez, who is a soils expert, felt strongly that there was an opportunity for quick development there. He told me that the soil simply lacked the nutrients to grow a proper crop. A little nitrogen, to be specific. He said to me, ‘"You know, this situation could turn around quite quickly.”

Now, when you have the experts saying that on one side and the philanthropists on the other side telling you, “Come on, let’s do something,” it gets pretty exciting. And that’s how the Millennium Villages concept was born. The scientists said, Let’s move. The philanthropists said, Let’s move. A year ago we went and met with the community in Kenya and talked to people there about it. And they said, Let’s move!

So we moved.

The trip this summer was timed to the harvest festival in Kenya, in which the community celebrated the biggest harvest that it had ever had. And it’s stunning how easy it was. I had told Pedro that he’d better be right about the nitrogen because a lot of people were watching, and lo and behold it was nitrogen! Putting in some basic fertilizer and helping the farmers use some improved seed varieties led to a doubling of their yields. Just like that, in one growing season. Very low cost, a few bucks per person in the village.

And we are not talking about just a few people being lifted out of poverty. We’re talking about five thousand people. And that cluster of villages is already serving as the model for dozens of other villages for miles around. It’s exponential. It’s viral. This is how the world is changed.

On my trip this summer with my family, I got to visit with the leadership of ten African countries, from the village level to the heads of state. Each leader committed to working with us to establish ten Millennium Villages in the next year. That’s a hundred altogether.

A year ago, we had two.

Wc first went to Sauri in the spring of 2004. Next, we decided to work in one of the toughest places on the planet, drought-ridden Ethiopia, where it’s easy to just throw up your hands and say, It’s impossible. But get on the ground, talk to the community, talk to the local experts, understand their distinctive problems, put it into bite-sized units, and what looks at first to be impossible becomes solvable.

Again and again from business leaders and philantnropists I’ve heard, Don’t wait for the government I’ll help you.

We identified an area in northern Ethiopia, Tigray province. It is an hour from the regional capital, and then an hour off the road, and then an hour off the off-the-road. It’s a beautiful, remote community of several thousand people in a valley that has tens of thousands of people. Again, we met with the community and found enormous enthusiasm and enormous organizationpeople who want to take their futures into their hands but need just a little bit of help to do it. They know about fertilizer, they know about improved seeds, they know about malaria bed nets, they know about

cell phones, they know about trucks. They know they don’t have any of these things. But they would like to have the chance. They’re saying, Help us a bit and we can get out of this. In fact, that’s what we find all over the developing world. The poor countries are sayingto the rich countries: Look, we know you have an income a hundred times bigger than we have. We’re starving, and you have more than enough to eat. You have everythingyou could ask for, and we have absolutely zero. We’re not calling for revolution; we’re not out to dismantle the world. We just want to have a chance to find a way over a long period of time to have some of the things that you have.

In Tigray province, their crop is a mix of teff, which is the staple grain of Ethiopia; sorghum, which is a dry-season grain; a little bit of finger millet, which is another dry-season grain; and maize, which is pretty much grown all over Africa. Tree crops, papayas and mangoes, can grow in this kind of environment if there’s a little bit of drip irrigation. And they provide both market opportunities and wonderful nutrition. So we started them with nurseries and improved seed. A local scientist, a wonderful young Ethiopian, was selected by the local government to head the project for us and get the community together. They built these remarkable check dams called gabions, which are just ways to preserve these mountainside villages from the short onslaught of floods and channel the water away from the crops so that the

It bears repeating: Extreme poverty is the best breeding ground on earth for disease, instability and terrorism.

water running down the mountains doesn’t create gulleys and destroy the land.

In other words, same point: simple steps, low-cost steps, all attuned to the area’s specific needs, led by the community, done by the community, but with a helping hand. That was early this year, and since then the local people have been out there doing the land reformation, doing reforestation, and getting ready for the planting season that was a couple months ago, and they’ll be harvesting soon. In the meantime, the clinic is being built and the school is being expanded, all within a very modest budget of fifty dollars per villager per year for five years, which is our standard amount of intervention. Then we’ve helped establish a local economy. And chances are, these people aren’t going to need us anymore. So the incessant talk in Washington about these corrupt people and their corrupt governments is just a galling excuse not to focus on practical things that we can do now to improve the world.

And for the hard-nosed among us, it bears repeating: Extreme poverty is the best breeding ground on earth for disease, political instability, and terrorism.

Thirty-six years ago, the rich world began in earnest to figure out what it would realistically take to help the poor world. A commission led by former Canadian prime minister Lester Pearson came up with the number 0.7. Here’s how they arrived at that: They said that there should be a transfer of about 1 percent of GNP from the rich to the poor. That’s one dollar out of every hundred. They said the public sector will do some and the private sector needs to do some, and that it should be about a seventy-thirty split. So that’s where the seventy cents came from. And that was adopted by the General Assembly of the UN in 1970. The U. S. resisted for a long time. We didn’t want to sign on even when the rest of the world did.

But in March 2002, the world’s leaders met in Monterrey, Mexico, at a conference that President Bush attended, and this conference adopted something called the Monterrey Consensus, which upheld

the 0.7 target. This time, the United States signed on to it. The American signature came after a long, detailed negotiation. The U. S. finally said, Okay, it’s only seventy cents. And the agreement it signed said this, in paragraph 42: ‘We urge developed countries that have not done so to make concrete efforts towards the target of 0.7 percent of GNP as official development assistance.” Check it out, paragraph 42.

This fall at the United Nations, President Bush said that it is dangerous to American security when countries are not achieving economic development. They become unstable; they become seedbeds for terror, for violence, for the major ills of the world. The whole U. S. national-security doctrine says that development is one of the pillars of national security. There’s actually nothing wrong with what these tough, self-interested types in foreign policy have been saying, because what they have been saying is that it is completely within our national interest to be helping in these circumstances.

The problem is not in the words or the logic; the problem is in our lack of action. We currently give about a quarter of our pledged assistance. We’ve pledged to give seventy cents out of every hundred dollars of U. S. income. Instead, we give about eighteen cents. For the safety of all Americans, we must insist that our government live up to its obligation.

When President Kennedy talked about helping the people in the huts and villages around the world, he said we did it not to fight communism but because it was the right thing to do. Turns out that it was right on every level, not merely morally right. It was right for our national security, for our global health, for stopping violence. It was right from a hardheaded, bottom-line, conservative standpoint, and it was right for winning hearts and minds at a time when we needed allies. And we need allies again.

This is a tiny amount of our income that could save millions of people and make a safer world, and it is really a measure of our times that we ask ourselves, Why should we give a few cents out of every hundred dollars to do something like this? And yet we do ask that question.

At the beginning of July, we flew to Libya for the African Union summit, where I was honored to speak to the African heads of state for the second year running.

Then on to London for the G8 summit.

I didn’t actually go to the summit in Gleneagles but worked out of London and left the morning of the bombing.

And Tony Blair got it absolutely right that day, and President Bush made a very good statement also, saying that it was all the more important to redouble our efforts in the fight against poverty and not let the terrorists take away from that agenda. And Gleneagles did produce important results: The G8 leaders committed to doubling aid to Africa. It was a welcome step in the right direction but a long way from what the world has promised.

After the G8, on to Ghana, where much interesting work is being done. A lot of the agricultural concepts I am describing are drawn from Ghana’s very vigorous scientific community of ecologists and agronomists, fruit growers and hydrologists. There’s a tremendous amount of local research that’s been done on African agriculture. And scientists there have solutions up and down the continent, and that’s what they want to apply. We’re not inventing any of this.

We went from Ghana to Nigeria. And Nigeria is quite another thing altogether. It’s the most populous country in Africa, one fifth of sub-Saharan Africa. The country has had an incredibly complex and difficult transition to democracy because it’s a sprawling, multiethnic, unstable country with a long history of extreme corruption. Nigeria is led by President Obasanjo, who is fighting hard on every front to create a rule of law, decent systems, and a constitutional government.

I’ve been working with President Obasanjo for five years now on all sorts of things. He has hosted an Africa-wide malaria conference and an Africa-wide AIDS conference that President Carter and I attended. He has hosted all sorts of other major initiatives because he’s a real leader and he really understands the stakes right now. He’s trying to get not only Nigeria on its feet but all of Africa.

So we will have many villages in Nigeria. In the north, we’re going to start one village project in Kaduna, working with the Islamic community there.

We also went south to the state of Ondo, which is led by a remarkable reform-minded governor who I immediately took to. He was chairman of the geology department at Ibadan University for many years and got

his Ph.D. in geology from the University of Texas. We decided together to launch a Millennium Villages project in his state. And that will be a site for two communities, Ibara and Ikaram, for about twenty thousand people, and we’re getting that started right now. The governor is on e-mail with me, and he is very determined.

From Nigeria on to Mali, which is right next to Niger. People are hearing about the hunger crisis in Niger, and the same basic crisis is also happening in Mali. It had a massive locust crisis last year, which ate up the crops. Timbuktu is in northern Mali. We went from the capital, Bamako, to Timbuktu, both of which are on the Niger River. Timbuktu is just at the boundary of the desert and was the way station for caravans coming from the north through the Sahara on their way to Ghana and other parts of west Africa and back again. So it’s a place of intersection, of nomads and farm people as well, and it’s the northern extent of settled agriculture. The villages on the south side of Timbuktu are the worst of the worst. I asked the village chief, What are you living on now? What are you going to do? It was obviously a very painful conversation. For him to be answering in front of everybody was not the easiest thing in the world, yet we needed to have the conversation. One option apparently was that they were going to borrow some seed, because they had lost everything—food, seed—to the locusts. And I asked what the terms would be. He had been looking down at the sand, and he raised his head and looked at me. The terms would be that they would have to pay it back twice, a 100 percent interest rate in one growing season, due in four months. Literally an impossible situation.

Have any children died recently? I asked the chief And I'll never forget his response. He waved his hand in violent disgust "So many! So many!"

But we have an idea that we are testing.

A couple of months before I was in Mali, I had been to the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, which is along the Ganges River. The Ganges plain is home to hundreds of millions of people because you have intensive agriculture there. You go from farmhouse to farmhouse and everyone has a hand pump and many a treadle pump,

which you use to pump water by foot. And the reason is that the water table is very close to the surface. You just dig down ten or fifteen feet and you hit water.

In Mali, you have the Niger River, but there are no pumps. And it looked so familiar to me. I said, How far down is the water table? Three meters, they said.

Why don’t you have a well down there? I asked, because everyone is without water. And they said, Maybe we could do that. Maybe a large project could come in. I said, But you just need treadle pumps here. This is perfect for small-scale irrigation. Now a real expert will judge this. And we have great hydrologists and agronomists on our team. So we’re going to start a village in Timbuktu, and we’re going to prove that along the Niger you can have irrigation.

The south of Mali is a cotton-growing area where we’re also going to have a village. And it is here that you see the direct manifestation of how American cotton subsidies actually lead to the death of impoverished communities. There we had a community meeting sitting in the

dirt. And I asked the people what had happened this season, and they told me

something quite stunning.

At planting time, an agricultural collective provides some fertilizer and seed. The farmers grow the crop. And then at the end of the growing season, this enterprise buys the cotton back from the farmers at the world market price. This year, the farmers were told, Well, you’ve just given us your crop and now you’re deeper in debt because the value of your crop is less than the input we gave you four months ago.

So these people literally worked for months only to be deeper in debt at the end of the season. The cotton prices are so low because we have heavily subsidized twenty-five thousand American cotton growers in a scheme that the World Trade Organization has declared illegal. Now, for cotton growers in Brazil it lowers their incomes and creates hardship, but in Mali it kills people. Because these people have no incomes, there’s no nurse in the village, there’s no school. And I turned to the chief. Have any children died recently? I asked. And I’ll never forget his response. He waved his hand in violent disgust. “So many! So many!” he said before lowering his head and walking away. And then the village all piped in that they’re losing children all the time because they get hungry, and then infection comes, and then the child’s dead. We’re not merely leavingthese people to their fate but actually driving them into greater poverty without any sense of responsibility because we’re not even compensating in other ways. Where’s the other aid? Where’s the “Oh, yes, we have to do it for our farmers, but here’s what we can do for you”?

So that was Mali.

Then we flew to Kenya, and Kenya is where we started this discussion. Not only is the village process working there, but the national government is very deeply engaged, so even though it’s a village program, it’s also a national program.

We had a good meeting with the Cabinet in Nairobi and then flew to Sauri for the harvest festival.

And let me tell you, on that day in Kenya, the cornfields looked like Illinois. And it was the most beautiful thing I ever saw in my life…

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