Millennium Villages – Africa

Shower of aid brings flood of progress, By Jeffrey Gettleman, March 8, 2010, New York Times: “In the past five years, life in this bushy little patch of western Kenya has improved dramatically. Agricultural yields have doubled; child mortality has dropped by 30 percent; school attendance has shot up and so have test scores, putting one local school second in the area, when it used to be ranked 17th; and cellphone ownership (a telltale sign of prosperity in rural Africa) has increased fourfold. There is a palpable can-do spirit that infuses the muddy lanes and family compounds walled off by the fruity-smelling lantana bushes. People who have grown bananas for generations are learning to breed catfish, and women who used to be terrified of bees are now lulling them to sleep with smoke and harvesting the honey. ‘I used to think, African killer bees, no way,’ said Judith Onyango, one of the new honey makers. But now, she added, with visible pride, ‘I’m an apiarist.’ Sauri was the first of what are now more than 80 Millennium Villages across Africa, a showcase project that was the dream child of Jeffrey D. Sachs, the Harvard-trained, Columbia University economist who runs with an A-list crowd: Bono, both Bills (Clinton and Gates), George Soros, Kofi Annan, Ban Ki-moon and others…”