From the Salmon

After I finished my previous post on Jeffrey Sachs and the UN Millennium Project, I stumbled upon a piece in the New York Times that describes Koraro, Ethiopia:

Koraro, which was recently chosen to be a United Nations test case in the fight against poverty, is where the rubber meets the road. It is one of the poorest and most isolated villages in the poorest and most isolated province of one of the world’s poorest and most isolated countries.

If poverty can be whipped here in Koraro, it can be whipped anywhere.

I wish the piece was longer, but it gives a glimpse into what could be a hopeful process. It describes what is, at least at the outset, a positive collaboration between the UN, the Ethiopian government, and the village itself. It shows a village that is eager to participate in its own transformation, a village that has been given the ability to plan for its future.

Obviously, since this is a showcase project, the UN and the national government may have more at stake in making this work than they will when this is extended to hundreds or thousands of villages. So it’s hard to say just how repeatable this trial will be. All in all, this piece doesn’t do much to address the concerns I wrote about in my previous post.

But if there’s one thing the Times piece drives home, it’s this: the Millennium Project’s ambitious goal of cutting extreme poverty in half by 2015 doesn’t appear quite as daunting when you look at it one village at a time.