For "The Idealist: Jeffrey Quest to End Poverty," Nina Munk, a Vanity Fair Journo, narrated the story of Jeffrey Sachs in his complex project called Millennium Village Project for about 6 years. She participated in several interviews with Jeffrey Sachs while on meetings and other conferences. The book revolved around cautionary tales of arriving, hubris, unintended outcomes, and hardships of making actual change. Jeffrey Sachs is depicted as a misguided leader and a planner who cannot juggle his issues without leaving others to drop. Maybe the activities are too hard to accomplish, but readers will surely admire and be shocked by the enormities, ambition, and difficulties in handling and battling issues surrounding poverty and disease.
In 2006, Jeffrey Sachs started a project in Africa to evaluate and test his theories. The first Millennium project was in the village called Sauri and a remote area in Western Kenya. People in the area concentrated much on farming. From the areas, the first outcomes were super encouraging. He initially stated success and utilized another $120 million from George Soros as part of the donors. Jeffrey Sachs started multiple projects, and his strategy was validated that it would increase across the whole continent at least as part of his approach.
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For the past six years, Nina Munk (2013) consolidated multiple reports mostly surrounding Millennium Villages Projects. She accompanied Jeffrey Sachs on his formal trips to Africa and listened to dialogue with heads of state, humanitarian firms, competing economists, and development experts. Munk (2013) immersed her own life in the livers of residents in two Millennium projects, Dertu in the desert bordering of Kenya and Somalia and Ruhiira found in the southwest of Uganda. She accepted the hospitalist of camel herded and small-scale farmers. She witnessed the difficulties residents faced to survive and understood the actual issues that challenge Jeffrey Sachs's approach to ending worldwide poverty and diseases.
The main goal of Jeffrey Sachs is to save the world and eliminate poverty within a few years. He argued that people living in less than a dollar a day are still many, but the aspect has been decreasing for the past 20 years, and for many cases, it has met the Millennium Development Goals that were launched in 2000. The recent development of poverty reduction is rapid economic development in Asia. However, there are still many challenges in Sub-Saharan Africa that have been found to have a slow poverty reduction. With his economics prowess from Columbia University and macroeconomist from Harvard, he continuously provides advice to Russia and Bolivia since the 1990s. She tackled many economic issues and termed it as shock therapy. At the end of the 1990s, he discovered Africa as the ground for AIDS, malaria, and endless poverty. Jeffrey Sachs was determined to do something about it.
The Idealist is an account of his work. Sachs continuously argued that the main cause of poverty in Africa is due to inadequate funding. Therefore, he channeled $200 billion within the first quarter of 2013, intending to eradicate extreme poverty. Nina Munk (2013) aimed to compare Sachs' way of handling issues and the realities on the ground. The main problems she identified are the shortage of rain, lack of economic opportunities, high fertilizer prices, and increased resentments and expectations. The Millennium Villages Project, which has headquarters in New York, encouraged small-scale farmers in sub-Saharan Africa to focus on drought-resistance crops. However, the residents argued that they do not like the taste of such crops.
Nina Munk (2013) portrayed Jeffrey Sachs as a global thinking master, cheerleaders, and fundraisers. However, every activity made slow development despite adequate funding being made available. The image Munk (2013) painted is that of social and economic issues. She argued that many residents starved and died due to diseases while still fighting endlessly to end poverty. Also, Jeffrey Sachs proved to be a hard man, driven, and truthful. The narrative of high hopes and expectations became the order of the day, and disillusions also emerged due to state and individual corruption. The grant was also the main challenge through the communities in the Millennium Villages Projects. Nina Munk (2013) also witnessed tribal thinking, community polities, ignorance, violence, resistance, and man challenges that slowed down multiple projects' progress. The depiction of Millennium Villages` local officials demonstrated smart and hardworking local individuals who aimed to overcome community prejudice, adverse cultural believe in the middle of unimaginable poverty, especially in the eyes of people who have not been there (Poindexter, 2016). Due to her experiences in the region, Munk (2013) concluded that Jeffery Sachs could not assist in ending poverty even with massive funding through aid in areas where there is huge corruption, isolation, drought, disputes, and inadequate resources. For instance, in the process of Millennium Village Projects, Dertu experienced an outbreak of malaria. Jeffrey Sachs provided enough resources and sent the residents more than 2000 mosquito nets to stop malaria. Mohammed, a local director, sent the net to many residents, but in return, they utilized goats instead of children, "explaining why in Dertu some nets were being diverted from a child's bed to a herd of kid goats." They found that "the livestock have more value than people" (54). However, Munk (2013) experienced development that Jeffrey Sachs argued could not happen without foreign donors. Nina Munk (2013) and Jeffery Sachs had a fundamental disagreement on handling corruption, diseases, and poverty.
Unlike most books about international growth, Munk's book is readable and short, about 260 pages. Each person is worth taking the time to read the book. It is interesting and with heartbreaking experiences similar to cautionary tales. While most of Millennium Villages have succeeded in assisting communities to enhance their health and eradicate, Nina Munk concluded that the two villages she took more time studying, Dertu and Ruhiira, did not make it in living with Jeffrey's ambitions as Ahmed, a local director argued that how much of that economic activity was the result of a real, lasting increase in income? "If you ask me if incomes here have increased, I'm not sure what I would tell you," he said. "I am not sure" (Munk, 2013, p. 164). Sachs massively seeks aid to improve Millennium Villages. His talks were intriguing, and he picked only a portion of communities to focus on intense strategies that surrounded health, agriculture, and education. Sachs hypothesizes that these approaches would help make a beginning to virtuous upward cycle and bring residents out of poverty (Schiffrin & Ariss, 2017). He felt that if one only dedicates their time to the fertilizers alone without tackling health issues, then the progress will not be sustainable, and to eradicate all the problems facing sub-Saharan Africa, it requires an endless supply of aid.
However, there are numerous concerns about Sachs` strategy. There are questions about the assumption of how rapidly the gains would materialize. Munk (2013) argued that "The cost of chicken feed had been higher than he'd projected. Building a chicken coop was more complicated and more expensive than he'd anticipated" (163). What will happen when the Millennium Village Project aid came to an end and how much the state would offer high per-individual expenses. There are also questions on how to measure the development provided the probability that individuals from neighboring regions would stream into their communities once the funding began flowing. It is clear in any situation that it is difficult to deliver an effective solution even when a person plans for each potential contingency and unintended consequences (Tsopanakis, 2016). There is also some case where there are natural tendencies in about all forms of investment.
Multiple things went wrong in the book “The Idealist.” For one thing, the areas that Jeffrey Sachs chose had all kinds of challenges, such as violence and drought. Also, the MVP started with an idealist "Field of Dreams" strategy. Most MVP officials advise the residents to invest in new crops in high demand in western nations. The officials on the ground did a respectable work in aiding growers to yield excellent crop yield by utilizing fertilizers, irrigation, and quality seeds. However, MVP did not capitalize on creating a ready market for the crops. Munk (2013) stated that "Pineapple couldn't be exported after all, because the transport cost was far too high. There was no market for ginger. And despite some early interest from buyers in Japan, no one wanted banana flour" (162). It is apparent from the book that the communities followed all the instructions, but the buyers were not there. There is a transparent thought that Sachs is the global smartest economist. He clearly understands the dynamics of the market. But in the projects within the books, Sachs failed to deliver excellent results.
The book is a masterful experience and a study of human experiences of the development enterprise. In my personal view, Nina Munk performed awesome character research on Jeffrey Sachs, and her stories depict his ambitions and brilliance. The book also depicts a human level and most persistent problems and elementary failings of the project. Munk demonstrated how essential and compelling mission is to mobilize attention and funding. She also demonstrated the mechanics and how this mission can break down when it meets the realities and real individuals. The book also demonstrated how development theory could be different from the realities in the ground as people can be unpredictable and irrational.
In her book, Munk (2013) did excellent work demonstrating how persuasive Jeffrey Sachs is how. She showed his energy and excitement over time as his projects continued to become complicated. This book narrated that excellent and great ideas are not most of the time. Ending poverty sound excellent, but it is hard to handle multiple problems on the ground. The projects' progression over 6 years in the villages faced multiple challenges, and Munk saw when deadlines of the projects were frequently extended as Jeffrey Sachs continued to seek a donation from wealthy individuals and governments. He assured people that poverty could be eradicated using simple methods, but in the end, each initiation seems unsustainable. Munk showed that it is essential to offer a home, save a few lives, enhance living conditions slowly and above all remaining patient, and take more time to comprehend what works to eradicate poverty and diseases.
References
Munk, N. (2013). The idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the quest to end poverty . Signal.
Poindexter, M. (2016). Local Empowerment: Agency for Unique Communities. Bridge/Work , 2 (1), 5. https://scholar.valpo.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1015&context=ilasbw
Schiffrin, A., & Ariss, A. (2017). News coverage of foreign aid: A case study of the millennium villages project in African, US and UK media. In Developing News (pp. 70-88). Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781315269245/chapters/10.4324/9781315269245-6
Tsopanakis, G. (2016, September). What Is Development and Why Even Bother? Narratives, Experts and a Quest to End Poverty. In Forum for Development Studies (Vol. 43, No. 3, pp. 521-530). Routledge. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08039410.2016.1208393
