The theme today is poverty. Disparities have been growing between rich and poor countries, as well as within countries. Turkey is not immune: the gap between the western, more developed, part of the country and the east has also widened. But nowhere on Earth is poverty more extreme than in sub-Saharan Africa where in 2001, 313 million people lived on less than $1 a day.Poverty appears so entrenched in this region that many cynics doubt it can ever be successfully tackled. As far back as 1970 developed countries promised to allocate 0.7 percent of their GNP to overseas development aid. In reality the ratio disbursed dropped from .51 percent in 1960 to 0.23 percent in 2002. All too often, the lack of progress in the fight against hunger and poverty is blamed on “poor governance” and corruption in Africa. These are real problems, but they can be overstated. The fact is that only a handful of developed countries have lived up to their financial commitments.
Amid the gloom and doom, there are glimmers of hope. The Earth Institute at Columbia, headed by economist Jeffrey Sachs, special advisor to the UN on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), is conducting an interesting five-year pilot project in 12 extremely poor African villages located in 10 sub-Saharan countries. The goal, in a way, is to test the MDGs, which aim to halve extreme poverty by 2015 on a small scale. A total of $110 was invested for each villager, in line with financial pledges made at the G8 summit of 2005 to help Africa: $50 per capita was provided by the Millennium Initiative, to which another $60 was added from contributions of local governments, villagers and other donors.
Most of the money was spent on a 75-percent subsidy for hybrid maize seeds and fertilizer. The rest was invested in health clinics, schools, wells to provide clean drinking water and life-saving anti-malaria bed nets. Training was also provided to make the project sustainable beyond its five-year duration.
Two years after the launch of the first scheme in the Kenyan village of Sauri (pop. 5,300) in August 2004, initial results were striking: the villagers had gone from chronic hunger to trebling their crop production. They were even able to sell some surplus on the local markets. Because farmers were required to hand over 10 percent of their food surplus to provide school meals, more children enrolled in education. Girls’ attendance, in particular, increased. The Earth Institute calculated that a $40 per family investment in Malawi brought returns equivalent to $400 in food aid. Not only are villagers adequately fed, they also learn to diversify their crops, store surplus in a cereal bank and even become small-scale entrepreneurs to survive as subsidies are gradually reduced. The project is only halfway through its five-year cycle, but results are already extremely encouraging. As Jeffrey Sachs outlined in his book “The End of Poverty,” extreme poverty could be eradicated within our lifetime.
