How Jeffrey Sachs Failed to Save Africa

The Millennium Villages Project was pitched as the most promising idea to come along in years. The aim was to smother the selected villages with help and jump-start them into self-sufficiency. The villages wouldn’t get just schools and health clinics. They’d get schools, health clinics, fertilizer, bed nets, water, food, roads, and instruction in agriculture and entrepreneurship. Mr. Sachs hoped to have 1,000 villages by 2009. He was convinced the models would be so successful that the world would be morally forced to fund the expansion of his plan throughout Africa. He was fuelled by the profound conviction that the world can be changed for the better – and that he was right and everybody else was wrong. What he forgot was the human factor. It turns out that people are not always rational. They don’t always do what’s in their own best interests, even when the benefits are completely clear to a development economist.