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Published: November 22nd 2006
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I had the great fortune and privilege to visit Sauri Kenya last week -- some 40 km sort of northwest of Kisumu. Sauri has been on my list of sites to see before departing Kenya. It is one of the first UN Millennium Village projects. There are some 13 original sites spread throughout Africa and Asia - many more have morphed in the last couple of years - all selected due to extreme poverty, lack of infrastructure and unique environmental, ecological, and health care factors. The idea is these villages can be incubators for unique solutions to unique problems. Sauri was chosen because the lands were depleted of their nutrients and because of one of the highest prevalence rates of HIV/Aids, and Malaria on the continent. I am so grateful to my friend Anne-Marie of C-MEDA who arranged this field trip and joined me along with colleagues from SANA and WIFIP. We also toured with a very bright fellow named Steve from Notre Dame University. Notre Dame is exploring establishing a Millennium Village in Uganda. Tim is the Assistant Director of the project and was on a fact finding mission. I have made a mental note to keep track of Tim
and his work.
Many of you may be familiar with Jeffrey Sachs - Columbia Economist, who has written the best seller "The End of Poverty" - with intro from Bono. It’s a fairly easy read if you are at all interested! Jeffrey and his colleague Prof. Pedro Sanchez have a simple thesis - (1) massive front end intervention with the best technology and practices in five strategic areas: (1) agricultural inputs & practices, (2) investments in basic healthcare, (3) power, transport and communication services, (4) investment in education and (5) safe drinking water and sanitation. This forms a foundation for sustainability. (2) Make this investment with the involvement and ownership of the community so that the improvements are sustainable overtime. Jeffrey Sachs is currently an advisor to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. The Millennium Villages Project is a practical on the ground experiment to demonstrate that the Millennium Development Goals aimed at halving hunger and poverty by 2015 are achievable. The project aims to demonstrate over its 5 year lifespan that a meager investment of $110 per capita per year - can have astonishing results if targeted appropriately and in a holistic manner. This challenges head on the current
debate about foreign aid and questions about what the billions of dollars have achieved -- despite deeper poverty?
Sauri is in the second year of the five year project and already is showing marked improvement in its standard of living. Soils that were utterly exhausted are now producing bumper crops with agricultural inputs and application of fallow technology (planting nitrogen fixing crops to re-generate fields). A cereal bank has been created to store the surplus and get the produce to market. Plans are being implemented to diversify the cereal crops into higher value produce such as fruit and vegetables. Even villagers have local stores of maize and beans in their homes - this did not exist two years ago. Electricity has made it to the center of the village - along newly expanded roads. Incidences of malaria have dramatically reduced with the introduction of treated mosquito nets. A clinic, pharmacy and laboratory now serve the 5000 residents. School rooms are being refurbished, feeding programs strengthened and income generating activities introduced - such as a dairy cow named Cherry. Fifteen fresh water springs have been dug and protected.
What impressed me most about Sauri was the involvement and enthusiasm
of the community members - the pride of their achievements and the pride of their new found knowledge. The Chairperson of the Community committee is Mama Monica. And Mama Monica is a force to be reckoned with! She is known as the Queen of Fallow and the key advocate for widows in the community - which are many. The HIV/Aids prevalence rate is upwards of 40%. As we met community member after community member and community chairpersons of the Education, Energy, Agricultural, Healthcare and water committees - I realized this project was far more than injecting aid dollars. This project is really about community mobilization and empowerment. It is about community making decisions that affect their own future and having access to resources that enable them to do so. The committee structures in place in Sauri would rival United Way (wink)! I have asked for a diagram - it would look like a spider web I am sure. And you know there is a wonderful Swahili proverb about spiders and their webs: when spiders unite, they can tie down a lion! In this case the lion is poverty and disease!
Now it is still early in this villages progression
and the real question still remains around sustainability. Over the next 3 years, direct aid and support will be fazed out. Ongoing healthcare & educational programs, infrastructure maintenance & agricultural inputs etc will have to be funded with village resources, savings and production. This will be the clincher - for projects in this part of the world tend to collapse when the aid or aid agency pulls out. But I walked away from my day in the field thinking this might be different. I walked away with tremendous hope for the future of this village and others like it.
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Rob
non-member comment
I understand the "wink"
"The road to self sufficiency is paved with good intentions" (pardon the pun). If there is anything your blogs have taught me it's that you have to start at the ground level. Having a goverment or organisation come in and throw a bunch of money around for a couple of years and then leave can cause more harm then good. "Give a man a fish and he'll feed his family for a day. Teach a man to fish" well you know the rest. It seems to me they have started something good in Sauri, I hope it continues, you can keep the spiders though.