NYT: Kenyan Village Serves as Test Case in Fight on Poverty

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Kenyan Village Serves as Test Case in Fight on Poverty
By MARC LACEY

Published: April 4, 2005


....Led by Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute of Columbia University, the project (in Sauri, Kenya) aims to fight poverty in all its aspects - from health and education to agriculture and energy in one focused area - to prove that conditions for millions of people like (farmer Patricia Awino ) Odera and her neighbors can be improved in just five years.

It is an important and uncertain gambit. If it fails, initiatives like that pushed recently by Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain to greatly increase foreign aid to Africa may seem foolhardy. If a single village cannot be turned around with focused attention, how can whole communities and even countries be revitalized?

The project led by Mr. Sachs grew out of the Millennium Development Goals, benchmarks created by the United Nations in 2000 aimed at prodding the world into reducing hunger and sickness by half, increasing school enrollment, and generally improving the lives of the poorest of the poor. Kofi Annan, the secretary general of the United Nations, appointed Mr. Sachs to oversee its poverty reduction efforts.

But setting the millennium goals - and putting in place a deadline of 2015 for seeing them through - has so far not meant much to people like Ms. Odera. Today the projections for reaching those goals keep slipping further and further into the future. It is now estimated that many of those goals will be reached decades late....

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That looming failure is what spurred Mr. Sachs and his colleagues to select a particular village with dismal social indicators - this one - where they would apply a more focused antipoverty strategy to prove that, with enough attention, the goals could be reached quicker than people think. Sauri's remoteness is one of the factors that has allowed poverty to get such a foothold here. It is a forgotten place in a country that has seen corruption devastate its national economy....


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/04/international/africa/04village.html