DEVELOPMENT: “If Anything Goes Wrong, Africa Is Blamed” – Sachs

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Christi van der Westhuizen

ROME, Jun 23 2007 (IPS) - Development plans like the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are “just words” if financing is not made available to implement the plans, says Jeffrey Sachs, head of the Earth Institute at New York’s Columbia University.

IPS spoke to Sachs at the Local Governments’ International Mid-Term Evaluation Conference on the U.N. Millennium Development Goals which ended in Rome Saturday. He told conference delegates that developed countries’ financing of the MDGs is “totally inadequate”.

“Don’t believe them when they say there is no money. There is more wealth than ever before. The money is just not getting channeled to people who are so poor that they are dying. There is no shortage of money in the world. There has been a shortage of follow-through from rich countries.”

He said that donors need to be helped to understand that the MDGs “are not just nice ideas” but that they can be reached with specific interventions. Researchers have spent years developing strategies to achieve the MDG on child mortality, for example. “But now interventions are not done in a systematic way. That is where the break is.”

Sachs is critical of the lack of donor accountability. The MDGs are very specific and require specific interventions, he said. But these interventions are not being implemented because there is no public accountability. “Jobs do not depend on the achievement of the targets so there is no sense of urgency (on the side of developed countries),” said Sachs.

“If anything goes wrong, Africa is blamed. And then the response is to build capacity.”

But, the large sums of donor money currently being spent on “capacity building” are wasted if money is not also spent on creating the conditions for such capacity to be utilised, Sachs added. Much more resources are needed to improve healthcare services, sanitation, electricity supply and infrastructure in developing countries.

The capacity of people to improve basic services and infrastructure will be built in the context of carrying out such processes, Sachs argued. He cited agricultural processing as an example, saying that the physical investment first needs to happen before training is done.

Capacity building remains theoretical if it is not part of a physical plan. He is convinced that donors have over-emphasised capacity building as a goal in itself. “It is everybody’s favourite. But it is a lazy way of thinking,” said Sachs. “Too much money is spent on meetings, conferences and workshops that lead nowhere.”

Money should be spent on concrete actions, instead. Development starts with money, he said. First the financial resources should be made available; then systems should be put in place, paid for with those financial resources. The result would be “real paved roads, real electricity, real infrastructure”.

Without financing, “everything becomes hypothetical. I am trying to get us to move from words to action”.

Sachs regards the Global Fund to Fight AIDS. Tuberculosis and Malaria and the Millennium Villages as successful examples of financing development. The latter refers to a project of Sachs’ Earth Institute where experts have been working with the residents of villages in Tanzania and Kenya to address their developmental challenges in a systematic and practical way.

He said that without the improvement of infrastructure in African countries, investors are unlikely to be interested in doing business in such countries. Cities need basic infrastructure and a basic level of management to create a cycle of investment, export promotion, increased city revenues and job creation.

As the cycle becomes entrenched, cities become better at building markets, trade and production. This is the way in which a city becomes globally competitive, Sachs said.

Sachs supports the direct funding of cities rather than working through national governments. “Not everything has to go through national treasuries. You can skip one or two steps and go directly to local government level. In this way you cut transaction costs.”

This does not mean excluding national governments, he said. They should agree to the direct funding of local governments. Examples of this way of working are the Millennium Villages where the money is spent at local level with the buy-in of heads of state.

(* Please note that the initial version of this story erroneously stated in paragraph one that Jeffrey Sachs is a Nobel Prize winner.)