Visiting a UN Millennium Village

Friday we set out for Mbarara from the capital city of Kampala. Mbarara is the second-largest city in Uganda, and we therefore had paved roads the whole way from the capital. They were two lanes and filled with pedestrians, bicycles piled with bananas and other freight, and cars passing vans and trucks in opposing traffic. The air was comfortable and mild, and we made steady progress southwest throughout the day, stopping only at the Equator and later for lunch at Masaka, where everyone who ordered fish received it whole with head, scales, and tail, as is the regional custom to prove its freshness.

In Mbarara we stayed out Hotel Classico, where we had a brief dinnertime visit from a representative of the United Nations Development Program, stopping by to say hello in anticipation of our visit to their offices and to Ruhira the following day. In the morning we went to those offices immediately after breakfast, meeting with the Water Facilitator for the project, the Administrative Assistant, and several others who happened by. The Water Facilitator, Raymond, was from the opposite side of Uganda, but had applied for and taken the job because he thought it a good opportunity. An engineer by training, he had previously worked with a diamond mining operation in Botswana. Raymond was full of smiles, a sharp dresser and clear communicator, and he remains the only person we’ve met in this region so far who is a supporter of John McCain in the upcoming US election.

At the UN Offices we learned a bit more about the Millennium Villages we’d been reading about, and about this village in particular. The initiative springs from Jeffrey Sachs’ arguments that intensive and holistic development has never really been attempted. A great deal of money has been spent, but often (1) for strategic rather than humanitarian reasons, (2) in ways that supported governments and not people, and (3) in ways that attempted progress without looking at the whole system. There are many examples of each of these points, but for the moment I’ll just further develop the last one. In the past there have been many interventions to improve education, but without improvements in water quality children either get sick or can’t take the time out of fetching water to attend school. A water system intervention, without education, may create a situation where people begin to have infrastructure, but do not have the technical background to maintain it or do not have the knowledge to manage its volume over the year, so that water remains during the dry season. The Millennium Villages, by investing only $110 per person per year in holistic development, address hunger, water access, health, education, environmental stabilization and preservation, market access for enterprise development, and energy access.

Shortly after leaving Mbarara we were on dirt road, then rutted, then remote, rutted, and rapidly ascending a mountain. As is often the case, its remoteness was accentuated due to the state of infrastructure. It was only about 60 kilometers (roughly 37 miles) away from Mbarara, but the roads were severe, the electricity grid did not run out to the village, and few people had access to motorized transport to carry them, if needed, into Mbarara. It took us a bit over an hour to get there, and we were covered in a thick layer of dust when we arrived.

As we entered Ruhira we first visited the school. There were water harvesting systems for each building, each of the buildings had been updated, and there was a satellite internet connection via the UN’s Mbarara office. We talked with the local teacher, Mr. John, who was assigned to work in the village this past September. He said for him the main differences in working there as opposed to other schools where he had taught within the Uganda Public System previously were that the internet link greatly improved access to information about any topic, the windows and doors were updated and worked, the students and he had access to water and were able to concentrate on learning, and he had to work harder because – with all this outside investment and effort – students and families were asking for classes on Saturdays to take full advantage of their situation.

From the school we drove into the town center, where the first thing I noticed was the litter – or the lack of it. We were stopping at the village office to meet the local UN Coordinator, Elly, and in town there was very little trash strewn about, a common site in much of the developing world. Here (in the shadow of the British) the word for awareness-raising is sensitization. I asked Elly if there had been a good deal of sensitization around rubbish and he confirmed there had been.

Currently there are 78 Millennium Villages in 12 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. They were chosen based on three criteria: (1) located in a hunger spot (at least 20% of children under 5 were underweight), (2) located in a relatively well-governed country, and (3) located in one of 12 distinct agro-ecological zones in Sub-Saharan Africa. Intervention in Ruhira began in 2005. Of the $110 spent per-person per-year, $10 is provided by village members, $30 by local and national governments, and $70 by donors and other nongovernmental organizations. About 5,500 people live in Ruhira, so over $600,000 is invested in this village during every year of this effort. The first burning question for this and other Millennium Villages is whether the intervention is enough of a catalyst and empowerment experience that the improvements in health, education, crop yield and overall quality of life will continue after the funding is no longer available.

The second burning question is that of community ownership. It is hard from our brief experience to understand the extent to which local people and local leaders feel ownership over the project and are part of designing strategies to sustain the efforts after funding disappears in a few years. At the health center we did meet an extraordinarily informative nurse midwife who was from the region. Elly was local, as we was the UNDP Admin Assistant we met at the office. This question of local or distant ownership and initiative is at the heart of the disagreements between Sachs and another Professor of Economics whose book we reviewed for this class, William Easterly. Easterly is staunchly opposed to anything approaching top-down development interventions. After a career spent working with the World Bank and other development interventions, he is a proponent of supporting the searchers in each community. For Easterly the planners are the top-down intervention-oriented individuals, while the searchers are the individuals who are looking for local solutions to pressing problems on the ground. Searchers make efforts based on locally available resources, while planners bring resources from the outside.

The Millennium Village was inspiring in many ways and it will come up in our discussion for the rest of the trip I’m sure. But for the moment we’re heading on to Kayanga, where we partner with several searchers on the ground.