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...goal: witness the beginning of the end of global poverty. The narrow two-lane highway to Sauri cuts winding path through the region's abundant maize and sugarcane fields, from which I could just barely discern the outline of mud-and-thatch homesteads, connected by a jagged patchwork of red-dirt roads and footpaths. Old women balancing oversize buckets of water on their heads and men in dirty sports jackets riding bicycles saddled with 200-pound bags of maize gave way as my car sped by. Shirtless youths burdened by unwieldy loads of brush piled high atop their heads stared wordlessly as I passed, and when young children caught sight of me they yelled, sometimes in fear, sometimes in glee, "Mazunga! Mazunga!" ("White lady!")
Sauri is actually a tight-knit constellation of eleven small hamlets with a total population of about 5,000 people. Most Saurians observe a mixture of Christianity and traditional Luo religion, which means they both revere the Bible and practice polygamy. Famous for their lyrical music and dance, the Luo are among the poorest ethnic groups in Kenya and have historically been discriminated against by the Kikuyus, the country's largest and most politically powerful tribe. The Luo are the largest tribal group in Nyanza province, an area where some 65 percent of the population lives in severe poverty, nearly a quarter of the children under the age of five suffer from malnourishment, and 20 percent are orphans. This leaves Nyanza's Luo among the poorest in an already poor country: at least 50 percent of Kenya's 35 million people live below the poverty line; one out of ten children dies before age five, most of them from disease; more than 2 million people are infected with HIV; 2 million have died from complications related to HIV/AIDS.
Grim statistics such as these led economist Jeffrey Sachs--special adviser to former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and director of Columbia University's Earth Institute--to choose Sauri as the location for the first research village of the Millennium Villages Project (MVP), an endeavor whose stated goal is to halve the number of people living on less than a dollar a day in sub-Saharan Africa by 2015. Sachs, named one of the hundred "Most Influential" people in the world by Time magazine in 2005 and best known professionally for his "shock therapy" approach to fixing the post-Communist economies of Russia and Poland, is also the author of the much-lauded 2005 bestseller The End of Poverty (foreword by Bono). In the book, Sachs claims that the world's intractable systemic poverty could be resolved, efficiently and quickly, via a package of inexpensive, scientifically based solutions, all for as little as $110 per person annually. Sachs founded the first Millennium Village in Sauri in 2004, and it has since expanded into eleven other research villages in ten African countries, plus an additional sixty-six villages that receive similar aid but are only monitored. Along with his colleagues at the Earth Institute, Sachs envisions the villages spreading across the entire African continent, creating "a scalable model for fighting poverty that can be expanded from the village to district level and eventually to additional countries."
It took about an hour, much of it spent driving on a rutted dirt road, to reach my first destination, Sauri's new medical clinic. Constructed with MVP money, the freshly painted five-room building stood adjacent to the row of squat, single-room structures that make up the Sauri community center. The center was home to a meeting room used by the villagers and also had plans for a computer lab and a library. I peered inside one of the boxy, whitewashed rooms, empty but for a few pieces of furniture and a small purple desk, above which was a sign that read: PROPOSED COMPUTER TABLE 1.
Outside the clinic, several dozen people sat on light blue benches in the shade of a tin awning, waiting to be seen. Decorative green-and-red-leaved plants sat on either side of a door marked LABORATORY in black, stenciled letters. Inside, I met a smiling young man who introduced himself as Jared Oule, a nurse from the Kenyan Ministry of Health on loan to the MVP. Inviting us into his tiny lab, which was stocked with a generator-powered refrigerator and microscopes for analyzing blood samples, Oule happily rattled off a list of MVP community-development projects underway: the distribution of seeds and fertilizer to local farmers; the expansion of an already existing school free-lunch program; a program to oversee the use of the community's newly acquired two-door Nissan pickup; the construction of cisterns to protect surface spring water from contamination; the creation of a business plan for a local cafe; even a proposal for providing Internet access to the villagers, once the government extends the power grid here.
The following morning, I made my way to a nearby Anglican church for a meeting with the Sauri Executive Committee, a liaison group that coordinates activities among the MVP's numerous committees. The first person I met was the chairperson, Monica Okech. A stout, grandmotherly woman in her fifties, Okech constituted a fine example of what could be called an "upper-middle-class" Saurian; this meant she had enough money to construct a concrete-walled and tin-roofed house, and she was able to regularly hire workers to farm her land. Okech began to tell me the history of Sauri's involvement with international aid groups, which, to my surprise, was a long one; Sauri has received financial assistance from international organizations for more than fifteen years. The World Agroforestry Centre and the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute have conducted projects here since 1991; Africa Now, a U.K.-based charity, came to Sauri in the late nineties to build spring-protection cisterns; a women's credit cooperative begun by CARE Kenya in 1999 was still underway; and the free-lunch program, initiated by the local school principal, had been feeding students since 2000. This struck me as somewhat odd. Given the wealth of ongoing development work, Sauri appeared to be a less than ideal choice as the site of a test case for poverty eradication aimed at the "poorest of the poor." If one were truly attempting to establish a representative baseline of data for the MVP model, would it not be more logical to choose an untouched locale?
The MVP has taken a decidedly different approach, relying instead on pilot...
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