Economist Jeffrey Sachs spearheaded the Millennium Village Project to create sustainable economies in villages in sub-Saharan Africa. Photo: kevin813 (flickr)

If you had millions in cash and a team of some of the most brilliant minds in development, could you transform a poor African village's extreme poverty to a viable economy in five years?

The Millennium Village Project (MVP) is trying to do just that. It is the ambitious, high-profile development initiative spearheaded by economist Jeffrey Sachs in 2004. Today the Millennium Village Project operates in 13 sites across sub-Saharan Africa. Each site has tailored projects aimed at improving health, education, agriculture, infrastructure, and commercial business, and relies heavily on local participation. According to their website, MVP says that by 2011 their role will shift from financing and implementing projects, to a more advisory one.

Jeff Marlow, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, recently visited one MVP site comprised of 11 rural villages in the Koraro region of Ethiopia. While he was there he wrote about his experience for the Nicholas Kristof's On the Ground blog.

Of the several posts he wrote, the "Sustainability Factor" was by far the most interesting to me. The MVP acknowledges that sustainability is crucial to success, but these villages aren't self-sufficient despite several years of support. Though Marlow found that huge gains were made in education and health, economic sustainability remains elusive:

What began as a five year initiative to end extreme poverty and send the Millennium Villages on their way toward further economic development has now ballooned into at least a 10-year program with no clear end in sight....

It’s hard to deny that the quality of life in Koraro has increased substantially: disease rates have plummeted, crop yields have gone up, and children are attending school at unprecedented levels. Does this mean the Project will accomplish its lofty goals and, as Sachs puts it, “end the dependency on help and create the kind of breakthroughs that will have a transformative effect on the world”? ...The Project faces fundamentally different challenges in scaling up and moving out than it has seemingly overcome in raising crop yields and cutting disease rates.

It looks like the millions in cash, brilliant minds, and local determination haven't succeeded in creating sustainable economic growth for these 11 villages. Maybe another five years will make the difference? We can only hope so.

Helping or hurting? NATO delivers aid in Afghanistan. Photo: Isafmedia (flickr)

How can you best fight global poverty? Academics, journalists, economists and sometimes even celebrities have been vigorously discussing this question for years, with big names like Jeffery Sachs, William Easterly, Dambisa Moyo, and Bono weighing in on the question of whether or not development aid actually helps the poor.

Writer and well-known humanitarian and development aid advocate Nicholas Kristof succinctly and candidly summarized the debate last week in an essay for the New York Times Book Review. (See my post "What a Marshall Plan Could Do For Africa" for more on the aid debate.)

Acknowledging that all sides have some cogent points, Kristof admits that "doing good is harder than it looks." But he's still an advocate of development aid:

The upshot is that we can now see that there are many aid programs that work very well. We don’t need to distract ourselves with theoretical questions about aid [...]. The new synthesis should embrace specific interventions that all sides agree have merit, while also borrowing from an important insight of the aid critics: trade is usually preferable to aid.

In other words, markets are irreplaceable in achieving certain goals, and humanitarian projects are important for others. Free trade won't automatically build schools, and building schools won't automatically create jobs.

The two can go hand in hand to create a better future.

Zahria, a 35-year-old mother of five, took out a loan from Afghanistan’s Mercy Corps-supported Ariana Financial Services to begin an almond-selling business. Photo: Miguel Samper/Mercy Corps

Our work to lend to the so-called "unbankable" is noted in September's O Magazine in a bit about Half the Sky. (The "O," of course, stands for Oprah.)

Mercy Corps-sponsored microfinance institutions reach more than 244,000 clients. Many of those are women in Afghanistan, where we founded Ariana Financial Services, a woman-led agency that has lent more than $11 million to 45,000 clients to date — nearly 75 percent of them women.

Mercy Corps is among several other organizations — including Hellen Keller International and American Assistance for Cambodia — mentioned in Half the Sky and noted in the O Magazine list for "Three Things You Can Do To Empower Women."

The article, unfortunately, isn't available online. But you can find it in the September issue of O, which is already at your local grocery-store or bookstore newsstand.

This piece was originally posted on One Table.

Early childhood education could be the best way to raise a nation's collective I.Q. Photo: horizontal.integration (flickr)

Are we simply born with a predetermined IQ, or can it go up or down depending on what happens to us in life? This question of nature versus nurture is explored in a recent study that shows kids raised in poverty have statistically lower IQ's than middle- or upper-middle-class children.

A high IQ doesn't just translate to intellect, writes New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. It also means a better chance of succeeding in life. Several studies show that intensive early childhood education programs can raise children's IQ's over time.

So to close the intelligence gap, Kristof says U.S. parents and policymakers should fund school-based intervention programs in low-income communities.

The implication of this new research on intelligence is that the economic-stimulus package should also be an intellectual-stimulus program. By my calculation, if we were to push early childhood education and bolster schools in poor neighborhoods, we just might be able to raise the United States collective IQ by as much as one billion points.

Sweatshop labor. Photo: Marissa Orton (flickr)

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote a piece this week that turns the conventional wisdom about sweatshops on its head.

Kristof sympathizes with those who do not like sweatshops and certainly does not want to see sweatshop-like conditions become the norm worldwide, but he points out that, in underdeveloped countries, sweatshops are often the most promising economic opportunity available. Particularly in times of economic distress, "one of the best hopes for the poorest countries would be to build their manufacturing industries." While anti-sweatshop campaigns are well-intentioned, in Kristof's opinion they end up destroying opportunities for the very people they attempt to protect.

Photo: Cassandra Nelson/Mercy Corps

South Sudan is so far away and so deep in the shadow of the crisis in Darfur that few would give the region a second thought. It borders one of continental Africa’s largest oil reserves but is one of the poorest regions in the world as a result of the two decades’ long civil war, waged between North and South Sudan. The war ended in 2005 with the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), but Sudan’s President Omar Al-Bashir, who is from the North, is slowly pulling out of that agreement. His armies, without reason or provocation, have begun creating conflicts in the south. New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof recently visited the region, where he examined signs of Khartoum's renewed interest in controlling the area through violence if necessary.

We think about Darfur as almost synonymous with Sudan these days, forgetting other parts of the country, where the conflict has left communities destitute and vulnerable. The limited media coverage tends to only focus on Darfur and the hope for successful execution of the CPA to resolve the crisis.

What we don't hear is that what is brewing in South Sudan might easily lead to the reawakening of a deep conflict that haunted the country for decades.

Kristof writes;

"Although people speak of renewed 'war,' the violence is more likely to resemble what happens in a stockyard. If it is like the last time, government-sponsored Arab militias will slaughter civilians so as to terrorize local populations and drive them far away from oil wells."

With such strong words, I expected to find coverage of this issue with ease – and was surprise to note that, except for a briefing published in March by International Crisis Group, [a few weeks after my original post], the growing violence in South Sudan is not being reported. I almost want to believe that Mr. Kristof has made a mistake – except he was there, not me.