A test of good intentions in a Kenyan village

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A test of good intentions in a Kenyan village

By Marc Lacey The New York Times

Tuesday, April 5, 2005

SAURI, Kenya Awino Odera had her handmade hoe cocked over

her head the other day, her face scrunched up into a scowl, sweat

pouring from her brow, her labors the very image of futility. Then

hope descended onto her cornfield.

" No, no, no, no! " cried Herine Okoth, an agricultural expert, as she

marched over the freshly tilled land. " Stop! "

Odera, a frail-looking 54-year-old woman who had never had a day of

schooling in her life, had thrown fertilizer in with her corn seeds

and spaced her holes too closely, both of which would reduce the

harvest she and her children would get.

" We agreed that you'd put the fertilizer in first, separate from the

maize, " Okoth said. " It's not so difficult. It's like this.

" Fertilizer first. Then cover it with some dirt. Then thrown in the

seeds. Then cover those. It's not hard at all. "

This settlement in western Kenya where Odera lives has become a

giant test tube for a UN development project, and Okoth's

instruction is part of that experiment. Eventually, there will be 10

such test villages across Africa, the world's poorest continent.

Led by Sachs, director of the Earth Institute of Columbia

University, the project aims to fight poverty in all its aspects -

from health and education to agriculture and energy - to prove that

conditions for millions of people like Odera and her neighbors can

be improved in just five years.

It is an important and uncertain gambit. If it fails, initiatives

like the one pushed recently by Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain

to increase foreign aid to Africa greatly 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 Sachs grew out of the Millennium Development

Goals, benchmarks created by the United Nations in 2000 to prod the

world to reduce hunger and sickness by half, increase school

enrollment, and generally improve the lives of the poorest of the

poor.

But setting the millennium goals - and a deadline of 2015 for seeing

them through - has so far not meant much to people like Odera. The

projections for reaching the goals keep slipping further and further

into the future. It is now estimated that many of the goals will be

reached decades late.

By then, Odera will be long gone. Her children may be dead, too.

Many of her grandchildren, some of whom have already lost their

parents to disease, will be well along in poverty-stricken lives of

their own.

That looming failure is what spurred 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 more

quickly than people thought.

Okoth, who interrupted Odera's planting, is one of the dozens of

experts working to make sure that this Millennium Village Project

does not become another pie-in-the-sky effort.

The researchers behind the program are keeping track of every penny

they spend, trying to demonstrate that for a modest amount,

somewhere around $110 per person, a village can be tugged out of

poverty.

" Projects come and go in this part of the world, " said

Mutuo, a Kenyan soil scientist who is the project director. " Some

people participate in order to get a free lunch. They see the

immediate benefits and not necessarily the long-term benefits. This

project is not about free this and free that. The attitude of the

people will ultimately determine whether it succeeds. People need to

get involved and stay involved long after the experts go home. "

Most of the aid, in fact, will come in the form of shared knowledge

from some of the foremost experts in the world in subjects as varied

as health, agriculture, energy and economics. Residents, project

officials say, will lift themselves out of poverty.

Pedro , a top soil scientist at Columbia University, is

advising the people of Sauri on how to revive their badly damaged

fields and how to plant trees as a way to fertilize the soil for

free. Officials estimate that the villagers' dismal crop yields

could double or triple as a result.

Not all the new food the farmers produce will remain theirs. This

project is devised to create a community spirit and so, in exchange

for their free fertilizer and seeds, farmers had to agree to give 10

percent of their yields to local schools. The schools will then

start a feeding program for children at noontime and, thus, lure

more of them, especially underrepresented girls, into class.

The project also plans to bring electricity to Sauri by extending

the power grid that came close to the villagers as part an old World

Bank project, but never actually reached them.

Researchers are also working to rehabilitate water pipes that were

set up years ago in yet another development project that went awry.

It is too early to say whether this effort will go the way of other

failed ventures.

Although the project is just getting off the ground, organizers are

already learning how much more complicated poverty reduction is, the

closer one gets to those mired in it.

It is easy, for instance, to talk of the importance of bed nets to

keep malaria-carrying mosquitoes away. But how does one ensure that

villagers use them and do not sell them in the market instead?

Already, village leaders have had to persuade one farmer not to sell

his free fertilizer, as he had planned.

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