A Better Way to Fight Poverty: Test Case in Kenya (2)
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Dear Colleagues
I don't know what others think, but the idea of "test case" sup-
port for villages like Sauri in Kenya seem to be the last straw
of "failed development". The recent work by Professor Jeffrey
Sachs and others on the Millennium Development Goals and the
book End of Poverty add almost nothing that was not well known
20 years ago.
into the right places has not been effectively addressed in the
past 20 years and is not being addressed now.
No matter how successful, the Sauri village project cannot be
replicated on any meaningful scale unless there is a really ma-
jor rethink in how all the official relief and development as-
sistance (ORDA) funding is used. If there are 2 million villages
like Sauri then the cost is going to be around US$ 500 billion a
year or about 10 times the total of present ORDA fund flows. I
don't think the Sauri experiment is serious, though it makes
good copy in New York and other places thousands of miles from
village reality.
I wish I knew more about the Sauri Village situation. It is
likely that socio-economic progress can be made on a sustainable
basic at a much more modest cost if the right mix of community
initiatives are supported, and the resources are directed at
economic value adding activities. My experience suggests that
much international help is expensive, unsustainable and driven
by inappropriate priorities. I would not be at all surprised if
much more sustainable progress can be achieved in Sauri with a
quite small proportion of the funding referred to in the arti-
cle. The local community needs to have access to the resources
needed. Thus financial resources should be easily accessible,
but not as grants, but as loans that the community would be re-
sponsible for paying back (or reusing again it its own local
community economy). Technical resources and know-how would also
be accessible as well but on a paid basis... with the local com-
munity able to choose what suited them best. Local technical as-
sistance needs to be encouraged and remunerated professionally,
and international technical assistance should be costed appro-
priately and only used when its value exceeds its cost. Doing
things in the right sequence can have a huge impact on the way a
community progresses.
I thought the Sachs book was an excellent description of the de-
velopment problem, however, not really adding very much that
could not have been written 20 years ago. I agree with much of
the criticism of the World Bank and IMF. I agree with a lot of
the descriptive material.
But I have real difficulty with the idea that spending more
money through the ORDA system, the UN and the UN specialized
agencies, and government and public sector agencies. In my view
there cannot be much of a solution unless there is a rethink of
how projects are identified, planned, funded and implemented and
also a revolution in the whole approach to transparency and ac-
countability. None of the ORDA organizations seems ready to com-
mit to effective transparency and accountability, and until they
do relief and development is going to continue to be costly and
ineffective, while being a godsend to the people that manage the
leaky system.
I was really disappointed that the End of Poverty spent little
time discussing the tremendous value destruction that is associ-
ated with ORDA activity as well as the local value destruction
that results from foreign direct investment (FDI). I was disap-
pointed that Sachs did not really address the issues of major
reform, but merely proposed more money essentially used (or not
used) in the same old way.
Sincerely
Peter Burgess
Tr-Ac-Net in New York
The Transparency and Accountability Network
Tel: +1-212-772 6918
mailto:peterbnyc@gmail.com