Jeffrey Sachs by Japhy Wilson

Author:Japhy Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

IMAGINED COMMUNITY

Despite Sachs’s claim to be ending extreme poverty in Ruhiira, my research suggests that the majority of the Project inputs are being appropriated by the better-off members of the ‘community’, while the 40–50 per cent identified by the Project as ‘extremely poor’ are being excluded from many of its benefits. This raises further questions concerning Sachs’s insistence that ‘the villages run everything’, and that ‘[e]verything that is done is led by the community’.44 The MVP prides itself on its ‘community participation’, and has set up ‘groups’ in Ruhiira, through which many of its inputs and activities are organized. But, far from being inclusive and participatory, many of these groups are comprised almost exclusively of the more affluent and influential members of the ‘community’, and function as a mechanism of exclusion of the poorest. In the case of the comparison that I have just made between the two farmers, for example, the commercial farmer was chairman of his local ‘Millennium’ agricultural group, while the landless woman was not a member of any of the Millennium groups, and had never been invited to a meeting by the MVP. Eight of the nine better-off households I interviewed were involved in these groups, compared to four of the ten middle-income households, and only two of the sixteen poorest. Many of the poorer people had heard of the groups, but felt unable to join them, either because they could not afford the membership fee, (50,000 shillings – about US$20 – for the ‘Kabuyanda Dairy Farmers Corporation’, for example) or because they lacked the necessary social status. An agricultural extension officer working for the Project explained this to me as follows:

You see, to say that ‘this is a group’, it means someone who has a feeling to join with other people, and shares their view. And in that [sense], those poor farmers may feel that they can’t afford to join with the rich people in forming a group. And in failing to join the groups, then we [the MVP] also fail to get them, because we will not know where they are.45

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