A very long pro­file of Jef­frey Sachs can be found in the Globe and Mail.

The arti­cle gives us a his­tory of his work. One of the youngest to ever receive tenure at Har­vard, Sachs was used by some gov­ern­ments in Europe to solve hyper-inflation and other eco­nomic prob­lems. Since then, Sachs was called on by the United Nations to solve the prob­lems of poverty.

For our snip­pet, writer Stephanie Nolen gives us the his­tory of the Mil­le­nium Vil­lages project.

The United Nations Gen­eral Assem­bly had adopted a list of tar­gets, the Mil­len­nium Devel­op­ment Goals, which aimed to cut extreme poverty in half by 2015. But it was clear by 2002 that many of the poor­est coun­tries, par­tic­u­larly in Africa, were not on track to meet the tar­gets and, in many cases, were headed in the other direction.

That year, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed Prof. Sachs, then the direc­tor of a big-budget Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity think-tank called the Earth Insti­tute, as his spe­cial adviser on the Mil­len­nium Goals, charged with draw­ing up a blue­print, com­plete with price tags, to meet them.

He deliv­ered his plan in Jan­u­ary, 2005. But he added a twist: He wanted to demon­strate, in his test-tube vil­lages, that it could be done.

They started in Sauri because it had so many of the typ­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics of extreme poverty. Two-thirds of its peo­ple were liv­ing on less than $1 a day, a quar­ter of them with HIV-AIDS, almost half infected with malaria par­a­sites and half the chil­dren vic­tims of chronic poor nutrition.

In addi­tion, the com­mu­nity had some his­tory of work­ing with inter­na­tional orga­ni­za­tions, which Prof. Sachs believed would remove sev­eral steps of groundwork.

In August, 2004, they met with the vil­lagers, whom Prof. Sachs said were wildly enthu­si­as­tic. They also got a warm nod from the gov­ern­ment of Kenya, which promised to sup­port the project’s infra­struc­ture needs, with paved roads and an extended elec­tri­cal grid. Med­ical advis­ers began test­ing every­one for malaria. The soil experts started ana­lyz­ing samples.

Six months after Sauri, they went to Koraro in the des­o­late Ethiopian high­lands. And now, the Mil­len­nium Vil­lages Project is six months into set­ting up in Ghana, Malawi, Mali, Nige­ria, Sene­gal, Tan­za­nia, Rwanda and Uganda.

Each vil­lage is located in a dis­tinct envi­ron­men­tal zone. Some have farm­ers, some nomadic herders; some are chron­i­cally short of water, some in an equa­to­r­ial fug. Each poses par­tic­u­lar prob­lems in terms of dis­ease, agri­cul­ture and infrastructure.

These fac­tors of geog­ra­phy help explain why so much of Africa remains ter­ri­bly poor: Hav­ing endemic malaria all year long and being 15,000 kilo­me­tres from a rail­way line are huge issues, not just a local quirk.

Work has also begun on expand­ing the Sauri inter­ven­tions to 10 sur­round­ing vil­lages, and in Malawi the plan has been rolled out to 13 vil­lages around the orig­i­nal one. The goal is to cover 560,000 peo­ple by the end of this year.

“We’re run­ning because we think every coun­try needs this push. And we’re run­ning because we’re try­ing an inter­est­ing thought exper­i­ment — treat­ing the Mil­len­nium Devel­op­ment Goals as real and not just a nice thing,” Prof. Sachs said dur­ing a recent visit to Kenya.

“I’m kind of des­per­ately rush­ing, hur­ry­ing every­one to the point of dis­trac­tion, because I’m watch­ing the clock — because every year lost is 10 mil­lion deaths. I can’t believe we live in a world like that. I can’t under­stand why it’s not the biggest damn cause on the planet.”

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