HEADLINES OF THE DAY: ANOTHER 15,000 PEOPLE DIED YESTERDAY BECAUSE THEY WERE TOO POOR TO LIVE. THE RICH INCREASED THEIR WEALTH YESTERDAY BY $0.3 BILLION. THE 21st CENTURY VERSION OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION IS ONE DAY NEARER.
A preview of the unpublished book A CIVILIZATION WITHOUT A VISION WILL PERISH: AN INDEPENDENT SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH by David Willis at willisdavid167@gmail.com. CHAPTER 1: INDIFFERENCE TO POVERTY (Part 63). This blog is a continuation of the review of The End of Poverty: How We Can Make it Happen in Our Life Time, by Jeffrey Sachs, published in 2005
Sauri’s Big Five development interventions
The international development community should speak of the Big Five development interventions that would spell the difference between hunger, disease, and death and health and economic development. Sauri’s Big Five, identified by the villagers as well as by the UN Millennium Project, are: agricultural inputs; investments in basic health; investments in education; power, transport, and communication services; safe drinking water and sanitation.
The costs of these services
The irony is that the costs of these services for Sauri’s 5,000 residents would be very low. Here are some quick guesses, which colleagues at the Earth Institute are refining:
Fertilizers and improved fallows for the 500 or so arable hectares would be roughly $100 per hectare per year, or $50,000 per year for the community.
A clinic staffed by a doctor and nurse, providing free malaria prevention and care and additional free basic services other than antiretrovirals, would cost around $50,000 per year.
School meals could be paid for communally out of just a small part of the incremental grain yields achieved through the application of fertilizers.
A village truck would be an annual inclusive running cost of perhaps $15,000 per year if amortized over several years (or leased from a manufacturer).
Modern cooking fuel for the primary and secondary school students (numbering about a thousand) in the entire sublocation would cost an additional $5,000 per year.
A few village cell phones and a grain storage facility would add perhaps $5,000 per year, for a total of $25,000 per year.
A combination of protected springs (with improved access), bore-wells (with pumps), and community taps connected to the large-scale storage system would provide access to water at ten convenient locations and cost around $25,000.
Electricity could be provided to the school, the nearby clinic, and five water points by a dedicated off-grid generator or by power line from Yala or Nyanminia for an initial cost of about $35,000. For another $40,000 in initial costs and recurring costs of $10,000, every household could be provided with a battery/bulb assembly to light a small bulb for a few hours every night with the battery charging station connected to the village generator. The annualized costs would be $25,000 per year.
Additional expenses would include scaling up educational activities, various costs of local management, technical advice from agricultural extension officers, and other related delivery services.
These investments would repay themselves
My Earth Institute colleagues and I estimate that the combined costs of these improvements would total around $350,000 per year, or roughly $70 per person per year in Sauri, for at least the next ten years. The benefits would be astounding: decisive malaria control (with transmission reduced by perhaps 90%, judging from recent CDC bed-net trials in a neighboring area), a doubling or tripling of food yields per hectare with a drastic reduction of chronic hunger and undernutrition, improved school attendance, a reduction of water-borne disease, a rise in incomes through the sale of surplus grains and cash crops, the growth of cash incomes via food processing, carpentry, small scale clothing manufacturing, horticulture, aquaculture, animal husbandry, and a myriad of other benefits. With anti-AIDS drugs added to the clinic’s services, the mass deaths from AIDS, as well as the deluge of newly orphaned children, could also be staunched. Sooner rather than later, these investments would repay themselves not only in lives saved, children educated, and communities preserved, but also in direct commercial returns.