In late August, the world’s most high-profile development project celebrated another milestone. The Millennium Villages Project opened its newest site, in northern Ghana, with newly minted Ghanaian president John Mahama and the UK’s international development secretary on hand. The official interest in the project’s arrival in Ghana only emphasized its unique stature in the typically wonkish world of development economics. Wherever MVP founder, Columbia professor, bestselling author and former World Bank presidential hopeful Jeffrey Sachs and his vision of aggressive, integrated rural development go, money, attention and political approval are almost bound to follow.
The project’s expansion and Sachs’s photo-op in Ghana belies the fact that just a few months ago, the empirical basis of Sachs’s enterprise was revealed to be flimsy. On May 8, the British medical journal Lancet published a paper that was supposed to vindicate the MVP, which has attempted to prove that an intensive and targeted sustainable development program could improve the lives of villagers in 10 African nations—and maybe in the rest of the developing world as well. He sold the MVP as nothing less than a revolution in development policy. The trouble is that the project has had difficulty proving that it was having its intended effect, or even any effect. The Lancet paper was going to change that. Its co-authors included John W. McArthur, the one-time CEO of Millennium Promise, the MVP’s fundraising arm, and Sachs.
