“It’s a model,” our tour guide at the Millennium Village Project (MVP) told us. To be copied by others. The MVP is a model village built with both foreign aid and local government investment to “help people transform their lives through tools and interventions that promote clean water, sanitation and other essential infrastructure, education, food production, basic health care, and environmental sustainability.” The village, consisting in Rwanda of around 25,000 people split into five "cells", is meant to serve as a model that can be scaled up and applied to the entire country. Some of the replicable strategies to fight poverty and promote universal education include warm meals at school, providing better prenatal care and maternity wards, and free, better seeds to farmers.
Saying free warm meals to kids at school is an educational and poverty-reduction model is not so far from saying that eating food to not die is really a great way for kids to learn how to read. And a maternity ward with beds for mothers who have just given birth is a great idea, but not a model: it’s an idea anyone who has ever given birth could have thought up, but just couldn’t afford. And free seeds? One farmer we talked to who initially received the better-quality sorghum seeds no longer has to buy them because he is largely producing them himself from the sorghum he grows. So I suppose it is money invested for long-term sustainability, but it's something that he perhaps could have done with lower-quality seeds if someone had bothered to give those away before. In other words – it’s as much an intervention as just giving people money is. Which, by the way, I think is fine. Sometimes just giving money is, in fact, a really good idea. Something that is sometimes taboo to say in the world of aid and development.
My favorite “long-term sustainable development” idea: “Micro-finance.” You know what people in Africa call micro-finance and micro-loans? Loans. All the small-business owners in Rubona I talked to who have taken out loans had someone co-sign their loan through a private bank, or worked hard to gain collateral to get a loan from a private bank, or used their predicted future income as collateral towards a loan. One woman worked as a farm hand for half year on 50,000 RWF a month before using some of the money towards rent for her new drink and snack shop and the rest towards collateral for a loan. None of this was through "micro-finance institutions." Others use loan-rotations where everyone pools their money every month and a different person gets all the money every month. These are not new ideas development specialists thought of. They are obvious ideas that were just lacking in money before. If you want to help, co-sign a small-business owner’s loan because they don’t have collateral. But don’t call it a new idea – it’s an old idea with a new person who can afford to implement it. Yes – it’s giving money to people who need it, not a model for people to copy or a strategy they hadn’t thought of before.
The Millennium Village is supposed to be a small model to scale up. You don’t need to build a “model” village with hot meals at school, contraceptives, and better seeds to realize that money should be spent on hot meals at school, contraceptives, and better seeds. Why is it only politically correct to give foreign aid for basic necessities if we pretend that the government of the recipient will realize, “Wow, what a good idea!” and spend tax money on the same needs? Especially when the Rwandan government was already spending money on a lot of similar but watered-down versions of these projects on a national scale before or during the implementation of the Millennium Village. The cooperatives, health clinic, new classrooms and small class sizes I saw in the Millennium Village looked familiar - almost identical projects had begun being implemented in other villages in the Easter Province around the same time, if not before, the MVP began.
One study fondly calls the village a "proof of concept." I am shocked that aid donors seriously need a "proof of concept" to be sure, 100%, that kids eating lunch is a good idea and that building more classrooms for the same number of students will lead to fewer students per classroom.
The goal of the MVP is to provide evidence-based sustainability and provide “tools and interventions.” We like the word “tools” because it reminds us of the proverbial fishing rod. We like “intervention” because it reminds us of rehab – something needed for a little bit of time before people get back on their own two feet. Not a hand-out. But calling subsidized loans a "tool" is hardly changing the model. We like things that are “evidence-based,” to, a phrase used to describe the aid provided in the MVP. I suppose if you took a representative group of all human kind for all of history, having food to eat does increase standard of living and job prospects, seeds do grow food, and contraceptives do, in fact, decrease birth rate.
The reason money was given for MVP was because of the rhetoric of “tools” and “interventions” and “evidence-based approach.” But the reason the MVP is a success is because money was given. And sometimes, good old-fashioned money spent wisely on things we already knew work works just fine.
It's not that aid cannot be given to promote a new model. Sometimes new strategies really do have the potential to work, and a proof of concept is necessary and the aid program really can be implemented in other locations. At the Millennium Village a farmer showed us how, if you cross the stems of a Cassava tree before planting it, such that the underground seeds on one side of the stem are facing upwards to the sky and other seeds are downwards to the earth, the roots and stems will both sprout and be stronger. At ASYV the model of having no punishment but only "DNA" (Discuss, Negotiate, Agreement) needed a proof of concept to show that disciplinary problems would actually be less prevalent. Other schools have expressed interest in adopting the model.
But because some models work, there is often an assumption that all aid has be given with the intent of establishing a "new" model to be copied, as if the reason the model was not prevalent until now was because nobody thought of it, rather than nobody being able to afford it.
Spreading techniques and tools supposedly empowers aid recipients more, because they are taught to utilize tools to create their own income. But when aid recipients need to pretend they are getting "tools" in order to receive aid, when in fact the tools are obvious strategies they are already aware of, it is putting recipients in a position where they have to pretend to be students, and not partners.
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