We’ve shown our skepticism about the Millennium Villages here before, in particular their apparent disregard for the importance of agrobiodiversity. If I am honest, I would say that that on balance they are probably a good thing. They are certainly well-intentioned. And little else seems to have worked. But no matter how many evaluation reports I read, I suspect it is this snippet that will stay with me, quoted in a New Republic review of Peter Gill’s recent book Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia Since Live Aid. Gill visits a…
…village called Koraro, chosen to be one of Sachs’s so-called Millennium Villages, which were meant as demonstration projects to prove that foreign aid can really work. He asks a local man whether he has ever met Sachs, to which the man replies, “I have met the owner twice”…