Millennium Development Goals – Sauri, Kenya

I started my work as, what we are now calling, the Millennium Cities Representative for Kenya, on Monday, January 8th. Lucky for me, a group of 4 graduate students from Columbia University’s School of International Public Policy and Affairs (SIPA) arrived about the same time. They are here as part of a workshop at SIPA, conducting research on potential investment opportunities in Kisumu, Kenya, the designated “Millennium City” here, and will present the results of their research to us in April. We have been going to meetings and traveling together since then and they will leave on January 20th.

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But first, let me give a very brief bit of background of the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) work in Africa – but to read a good account, I recommend Jeffrey Sach’s book, The End of Poverty, or look at The Earth Institute’s website (www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu). The Millennium Development Goals were adopted in 2000 at the UN Millennium Summit and encompass the world’s goals for significantly reducing extreme poverty (people living with an income of under a dollar a day – that’s a billion people today!) by 2015. There are 8 goals – eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and empower women; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDs, malaria and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and develop a global partnership for development.

So how are these goals going to be met? Well, Jeffrey Sachs was asked by, then UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan to become his special advisor on the goals and come up with practical solutions for meeting them. The UN Millennium Project was thus formed, in partnership with Columbia’s Earth Institute, to demonstrate in 12 villages (of approximately 5,000 households each) throughout sub-Saharan Africa that, with a little assistance (its hard to expect people that have less than nothing to do anything with that nothing - aid of some form is necessary), and the right tools (you can’t just hand someone fertilizer who has never used it and expect them to know how), achievement of the goals can happen. One of the 12 research villages is in Sauri, Kenya, in the Siaya District, just a 45 minute drive from Kisumu (the Millennium City). There are now also 66 other funded Millennium Villages throughout Africa. I had the opportunity to spend time in Sauri this past Monday, January 15.

Here’s an over-simplified example of what happened, and is happening, in Sauri. It cost $110 per person in Sauri in 2005, all of in-kind contributions, to start the Millennium Village Project there. That funding comes from a mixture of the Millennium Project, the government, and other donors. It reflects the yearly cost to supply each household in the village with high-yield seeds and fertilizer, to provide malaria bed nets to everyone, to operate a health clinic, to provide midday school lunches, to improve the water supply and the roads. Doesn’t sound like much, huh? There is a 5-year plan for each village with the idea being that each year households will produce more food and move away from subsistence to savings. As their incomes increase, the $110 in aid decreases. Once people can save, they can afford to buy their own fertilizer. In addition, the village provides surplus to the school for lunches, they learn to run the health clinic, to repair the roads if the government will not, to drill and maintain their own boreholes for water, and generally, to organize themselves and control their resources. The MDG team works with them to teach them necessary skills, such as how to use their resources efficiently, how to sell their crops at market, and how to take care of their healthcare needs.

Before, the people of Sauri used almost no fertilizer and an acre of maize yielded only approximately 4 bags at harvest. People of Sauri were starving, and dying from malaria and HIV/AIDs. From 2005 to 2006, the output of a maize harvest more than doubled. People learned to start to store their grain and to market and sell it. With the provision of lunches from surplus food production, school attendance increased from 25% to 100%. Malaria rates dropped significantly with the bed nets and the health clinic services. In general, there has been a rise in the standard of living. No one is starving.

The next step is to replicate this model in every village throughout Africa (as simultaneously as possible) and to start to improve the cities. As life gets better in the rural areas, we expect people to move away from agriculture and head for other work opportunities in the cities. Today, those opportunities and the chance of having a decent life in most African cities, with good infrastructure to support them, do not exist. Thus, in January 2006, Jeff Sachs designated 8 Millennium Cities, one being Kisumu, where we will work to increase investment opportunities there through a combination of needs assessments, policy advising, investor roundtables and development strategies.

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So, back to what I’ve been doing…I spent most of my first day on Monday (January 8th) simply trying to meet people at the MDG Centre here in Nairobi. The MDG Centre is located in the ICRAF facilities (for International Center for Research in Agroforestry) right next door to the UN, part of a large, very green campus with Indonesian-styled buildings that have open central atriums. I had lunch with Margaret the first day, a woman heading up our public sector policy work, at the lunch facility there, an outdoor area with grills where cooks prepare all sorts of traditional Kenyan or Indian / Malaysian dishes.

On Tuesday, with the Columbia students, we began making the rounds in Nairobi, meeting with the Chair of the Urban Planning Dept. of the University of Nairobi, with an official in the Ministry of Local Planning, with an economist and with someone in the Dutch embassy. Driving all over Nairobi that day gave me a great introduction to it, and I find it fascinating, busy, surprisingly very green with lots of hills, woods and flowers, and very colorful.

Then, on Wednesday, I boarded a bus for the trip to Kisumu…

(Pictured: Men in the community resource center at Sauri; People waiting to be seen outside the health clinic in Sauri. Double-click to enlarge)