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.
Tens of thousands of Filipino Catholics yesterday twirled white cloths and chanted “Viva, viva,” as a centuries-old statue of Jesus Christ was paraded through the streets of Manila in the nation’s biggest annual religious event. The day-long procession began before dawn, with barefoot volunteers pulling the heavy carriage through narrow streets where the devout waited in hopes of touching the icon, believed to hold miraculous powers. Thousands of police were deployed to manage crowds that officials believe could number in the millions by the time the statue reaches its home in central Manila’s Quiapo church around midnight. More than 800 people had sought
DENIAL: Pyongyang said a South Korean drone filmed unspecified areas in a North Korean border town, but Seoul said it did not operate drones on the dates it cited North Korea’s military accused South Korea of flying drones across the border between the nations this week, yesterday warning that the South would face consequences for its “unpardonable hysteria.” Seoul quickly denied the accusation, but the development is likely to further dim prospects for its efforts to restore ties with Pyongyang. North Korean forces used special electronic warfare assets on Sunday to bring down a South Korean drone flying over North Korea’s border town. The drone was equipped with two cameras that filmed unspecified areas, the General Staff of the North Korean People’s Army said in a statement. South Korea infiltrated another drone
COMMUNIST ALIGNMENT: To Lam wants to combine party chief and state presidency roles, with the decision resting on the election of 200 new party delegates next week Communist Party of Vietnam General Secretary To Lam is seeking to combine his party role with the state presidency, officials said, in a move that would align Vietnam’s political structure more closely to China’s, where President Xi Jinping (習近平) heads the party and state. Next week about 1,600 delegates are to gather in Hanoi to commence a week-long communist party congress, held every five years to select new leaders and set policy goals for the single-party state. Lam, 68, bade for both top positions at a party meeting last month, seeking initial party approval ahead of the congress, three people briefed by
Cambodia’s government on Wednesday said that it had arrested and extradited to China a tycoon who has been accused of running a huge online scam operation. The Cambodian Ministry of the Interior said that Prince Holding Group chairman Chen Zhi (陳志) and two other Chinese citizens were arrested and extradited on Tuesday at the request of Chinese authorities. Chen formerly had dual nationality, but his Cambodian citizenship was revoked last month, the ministry said. US prosecutors in October last year brought conspiracy charges against Chen, alleging that he had been the mastermind behind a multinational cyberfraud network, used his other businesses to launder
RSS