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Poverty And Hunger Special Feature: The African Millennium Villages

Pedro Sanchez, Cheryl Palm, Jeffrey Sachs, Glenn Denning, Rafael Flor, Rebbie Harawa, Bashir Jama, Tsegazeab Kiflemariam, Bronwen Konecky, Raffaela Kozar, Eliud Lelerai, Alia Malik, Vijay Modi, Patrick Mutuo, Amadou Niang, Herine Okoth, Frank Place, Sonia Ehrlich Sachs, Amir Said, David Siriri, Awash Teklehaimanot, Karen Wang, Justine Wangila, and Colleen Zamba

PNAS Vol. 104, no. 43

23 October 2007

Readers can access the full set of papers contained in the PNAS special feature "Poverty and Hunger", published in 2007, at: www.pnas.org/cgi/collection/poverty_and_hunger
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At the Millennium Summit in September 2000, world leaders set forth quantified and time-bound goals, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), to cut extreme poverty, hunger, disease, gender inequality, environmental degradation, lack of access to safe drinking water, and sanitation. In January 2005, the United Nations Millennium Project released a series of reports identifying practical ways to achieve the MDGs (1). Although the MDGs have been generally accepted as the world’s goals, there are questions and controversies about how to attain them. sub-Saharan Africa is the only region still severely off-track to reach the MDGs by 2015 (1). Several biophysical and economic constraints impede sub-Saharan Africa’s escape from extreme poverty, including extremely low productivity of food production (2–4), heavy burden of infectious disease (5, 6), and insufficient core infrastructure in water, roads, power, and telecommunications (7, 8).

Rationale

The poverty trap in Africa results from the extreme shortage of productive capital in the rural areas, where.70% of the population lives. A below-subsistence living standard means that survival depends on low or zero financial saving, and the depletion of natural capital, a form of dissaving. Poverty prohibits African households from self-financing farminputs on the open market, and the lack of collateral and high transactions costs prohibit the finance of inputs through market-based credits. Risk of drought adds to the barrier of market-based financing of the poor. The result is that a high proportion of households plant their crops without improved inputs (seeds, fertilizers), and soils become depleted of nutrients after repeated crop cycles without sufficient nutrient replenishment (9). There is little scope for net positive saving or environmental sustainability.

Just as Africa’s food crisis is a reflection of the interaction of biophysical and economic factors, so too is the health crisis. Disease burdens reflect an interaction of tropical climates, disease vectors unique to Africa, and the lack of basic public health services (1). Malaria and AIDS stand out as uniquely high burdens in Africa, and both have run rampant in recent decades because of a lack of adequate public health response, which in turn has been hampered by the lack of adequate financing of public health measures.

Hunger and disease also interact with low food intake and nutritional deficiencies, leading to reduced immune response. High disease burdens (such as infection with soil-transmitted parasites) result in reduced nutritional intake (2, 4). High child mortality blocks the demographic transition to low fertility rates, and rapid population growth and large families exacerbate poverty. Finally, poverty also contributes to poor governance, which, in turn, exacerbates poverty. The result is a poverty trap in which poverty, hunger, disease, rapid population growth, environmental degradation, and poor governance are all mutually reinforcing (10). The ‘‘Washington consensus’’ imposed by the Bretton Woods institutions during the 1980s and 1990s did not address these underlying factors and did not enable tropical sub-Saharan Africa to escape from the poverty trap (1).

Approach

The underlying hypothesis of the United Nations Millennium Project is that the multifaceted nature of poverty in rural Africa can be overcome through targeted public-sector investments to raise rural productivity, leading to increased private-sector savings and investments. By significantly augmenting the capital stock of households and the community in several dimensions, the poverty trap can be escaped. Several kinds of capital need to be increased: natural (soil nutrients), infrastructure (roads, power, telecommunications), human (skills and health), and financial (household assets, collateral, microfinance). The key is to raise the capital stock above a threshold level, above which the village can move toward self-sustaining economic growth. Ideally, this would be carried out on a large scale, involving an entire region or nation in capital accumulation along these lines. The United Nations Millennium Project recommended that such capital investments be made at an appropriate magnitude and time scale, tackling all sectorswith costs shared by communities, governments, and donors (1). This approach contrasts with projects that emphasize macroeconomic stability or incremental steps in a single sector.

Such public investments at scale initiate a positive dynamic of saving and growth that supports private-sector investments in two ways. First, household incomes rise above subsistence, so that household-based capital accumulation and microfinance become feasible. Second, the existence of good roads, power, and telecommunications encourages the inflow of capital from outside investors. The initial economic takeoff usually occurs in agriculture, with the transformation of below-subsistence communities into commercial farming communities that are able to save, invest, and diversify into productive nonfarm work The public-sector investments are designed to stimulate, rather than replace, private-sector investments. In this sense, the project is consistent with a marketbased and mixed-economy strategy of economic development. These investments are underpinned by three major science-based initiatives: Africa’s green revolution (11, 12), the worldwide advances in treating malaria, HIV-AIDS, and neglected tropical diseases (5, 6), and improvements in information technology.

Table 1. Recommended level of investment for rural African villages by the United Nations Millennium Project (1)


In March 2004, theMVPwas conceived as a proof of concept that the poverty trap can be overcome and the MDGs achieved by 2015 at the village-scale in rural Africa by applying the United Nations Millennium Project’s recommended interventions in multiple sectors at the investment level of $110 per capita per year sustained over a period of 5–10 years (Table 1). The main principles of the MVP are:

  • Science- and evidence-based, implementing technologies and practices that have already been proven.
  • Community-based, with a participatory approach to planning, implementation, and monitoring that contextualizes the specific set of interventions for each village.
  • Enhanced by local capacity development in technical, managerial, and participatory skills.
  • Based on multisectoral and integrated interventions.
  • Geared toward gender equality and environmental sustainability.
  • Linked to district, national, and global strategies.
  • Supported by partnerships with other development groups.
  • Cost-shared by the community, government, and donors.
  • Supported by increased national-scale financing of public goods in line with increased official development assistance (ODA) made available to African governments.




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