The financier and philanthropist George Soros said on Tuesday that he was contributing US$50 million to support a vast social experiment -- organized and led by the economist Jeffrey Sachs -- that aims to help villages in Africa escape grinding poverty.
Soros' money will, among other things, pay for fertilizers and improved seeds to raise crop yields, classrooms to improve literacy and health clinics to reduce deaths in 33 villages in 10 African countries.
The hope is that poor subsistence farmers will begin earning more income by selling crops at the market.
The strategy, which Sachs has been pursuing since 2004 through his nonprofit group, the Millennium Promise, is to tackle the many problems of poverty all at once.
This, Sachs argues, will be achieved by providing villagers with relatively inexpensive technologies and approaches -- including mosquito nets that prevent malaria and stoves with chimneys that reduce deadly indoor air pollution.
Soros' contribution is a philanthropic departure for him.
To date, he has largely focused on fostering democracy and good governance.
But during an interview on Tuesday he expressed his belief that this undertaking had a humanitarian value for the participating villages, as well as some chance of building a successful model that could be copied.
"It requires the support or at least benevolent attitudes from the governments concerned," he said.
"In my view, most of the poverty in the world is due to bad governance," Soros said.
"And whether the project can overcome that is a big question. If it succeeds in five of 10 countries and can be scaled up, that would be a tremendous achievement."
Sachs said he believed that donors -- who for many years have supported projects like the battle against AIDS -- should now help jump-start economic growth in rural areas through the distribution of fertilizers, various higher-yielding seeds and inexpensive small-scale irrigation methods.
Sachs launched his experiment with a single cluster of villages located in western Kenya, but it has since expanded to 79 such clusters in a dozen other countries.
His nonprofit group estimated that the cost of the package of village-level investments was US$110 per person a year for five years.
Millennium Promise is putting up US$50 a year, with the balance coming from African governments, other donors and the villagers themselves.
Kouri Richins, a Utah mother who published a children’s book about grief after the death of her husband is to serve a life sentence for his murder without the possibility of parole, a judge ruled on Wednesday. Richins was convicted in March of aggravated murder for lacing a cocktail given to her husband, Eric Richins, with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl at their home near Park City in 2022. A jury also found her guilty of four other felonies, including insurance fraud, forgery and attempted murder for trying to poison her husband weeks earlier on Feb. 14, 2022, with a
‘PERSONAL MISTAKES’: Eileen Wang has agreed to plead guilty to the felony, which comes with a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison A southern California mayor has agreed to plead guilty to acting as an illegal agent for the Chinese government and has resigned from her city position, officials said on Monday. Eileen Wang (王愛琳), mayor of Arcadia, was charged last month with one count of acting in the US as an illegal agent of a foreign government. She was accused of doing the bidding of Chinese officials, such as sharing articles favorable to Beijing, without prior notification to the US government as required by law. The 58-year-old was elected in November 2022 to a five-person city council, from which the mayor is selected
DELA ROSA CASE: The whereabouts of the senator, who is wanted by the ICC, was unclear, while President Marcos faces a political test over the senate situation Philippine authorities yesterday were seeking confirmation of reports that a top politician wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) had fled, a day after gunfire rang out at the Philippine Senate where he had taken refuge fearing his arrest. Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, the former national police chief and top enforcer of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs,” has been under Senate protection and is wanted for crimes against humanity, the same charges Duterte is accused of. “Several sources confirmed that the senator, Senator Bato, is no longer in the Senate premises, but we are still getting confirmation,” Presidential
HELP DENIED? The US Department of State said that the Cuban leadership refuses to allow the US to provide aid to Cubans, ‘who are in desperate need of assistance’ US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday said that Cuba’s leadership must change, as Washington renewed an offer of US$100 million in aid if the communist nation agrees to cooperate. Cuba has been suffering severe economic tumult led by an energy shortage that plunged 65 percent of the country into darkness on Tuesday. Cuba’s leaders have blamed US sanctions, but Rubio, a Cuban American and critic of the government established by Fidel Castro, said the system was to blame, including corruption by the military. “It’s a broken, nonfunctional economy, and it’s impossible to change it. I wish it were different,” he told
RSS