Philanthrocapitalism_ How Giving Can Save the World - Matthew Bishop [51]
In 2000, the United Nations adopted the Millennium Development Goals. It pledged to cut in half the number of people living in extreme poverty (less than $1 a day) by 2015; to reduce by half the number of people suffering from hunger; to ensure all children at least a primary school education (each year of schooling adds 10 percent a year to the income of a person in a poor country); to end the disparity in school attendance between boys and girls; to reduce mortality among children under five by two-thirds and maternal mortality by three-quarters; to cut in half the number of people without access to clean water; and to halt and begin to reverse the incidence of HIV/AIDS, TB, malaria, and other major infectious diseases.
In 1999, the G8, the world’s major economic powers, launched the millennium debt relief initiative to forgive the debts of the poorest highly indebted nations if they protected human rights and agreed to put all their savings into education, health, or economic development. In 2005, the G8 leaders pledged another round of debt relief and promised to double aid to Africa, to $50 billion per year. But no one believes that even these big steps will be enough to enable the poorest African nations to reach the Millennium Development Goals. Almost half the people in sub-Saharan Africa are living in poverty, about one-third are malnourished, more than 300 million people live on less than $1 a day, and the support systems necessary for success are often inadequate or nonexistent. Where to start? Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, a renowned Columbia University economist who was U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan’s special advisor on the Millennium Development Goals, has for years been promoting the concept of Millennium Villages as the best way for public and private aid to help poor people work themselves out of poverty. And he believes each village can do it in five years.
The villages work to increase food production; improve nutrition, especially for pregnant women, nursing mothers, and infants; provide basic health care, education, and clean water; promote gender equality; and eliminate the digital divide. The first village, launched in 2004 in Sauri, Kenya, saw a tripling of crop production, with villagers moving from chronic hunger to selling their products in nearby markets. A second village in Ethiopia achieved similar results. The government of Japan provided funding for an additional ten villages in other African nations. As of mid-2007, there were seventy-nine of them.
Private donors can now contribute to increasing the number of villages through Millennium Promise, an NGO working with the U.N. Development Program and other partners. George Soros has pledged millions to the effort, but you don’t have to be as wealthy as he is to make a measurable difference. Each Millennium Village requires a total private donor investment of $250,000 for a village of five thousand people. That means someone who gives $50 to Millennium Promise can help sponsor one villager in a Millennium Village for a year.
The villages have already produced some impressive results. In Sauri, a young man who returned home after losing his job at a textile factory received good seed, fertilizer, and instructions on how to manage his crops. He greatly increased his yield, diversified his crops, added livestock, and installed bed nets in his home to protect his five children against malaria. In Ghana, Millennium Promise gives seeds and fertilizer to farmers and requires them, in return, to donate 10 percent of their produce to the nation’s school-feeding program, which often provides a child’s only meal (a good example of “Passing on the Gift”). In Ikaram, Nigeria, after five fallow years, farmers are growing bananas, pumpkins, yams, tomatoes, and chili as well as the standard maize, cassava, and beans. Undernourishment has decreased significantly. Millennium Promise is chipping away at the Millennium Development Goals one village at a