by Alex Perry
Here too was another reason for staying in the background. The Newark model for social change left Chambers no room for personal publicity. How would allowing himself to be congratulated in public endear Chambers to his peers or persuade them to part with their money? Far better to let them take the credit. Credit, of any kind, was the currency of leverage.
From the map display on Chambers’s plane, I can see we are leaving the Serengeti, passing north over the Mara River and into Kenya. It is August, the summer rains are over, and the landscape is brown and parched. Below us, in the eastern Rift Valley, more than a million wildebeest and zebras who have followed the rains north will be turning south once more on their never-ending quest for greener grass. As we watch the great plains pass beneath us, Chambers recounts how it was there in January 2006 that his interest in malaria began to solidify.
By that time, Chambers had been giving his money to good causes for more than fifteen years, but his efforts were still largely confined to the US. In the aftermath of 9/11, it dawned on him that the same anger he had seen on the streets of Newark—a destructive frustration at deprivation and exclusion—was also fueling Muslim radicals around the world. Inequality provides the incentives to make capitalism work. But if that disparity is made insurmountable by barriers like poverty, poor education, corruption, class, or caste, then the incentive becomes one not to legitimate advancement but advancement by any means necessary. Islamists felt the US unfairly dominated world politics, economics, religion, and culture. The 9/11 attacks were the ultimate expression of the fury that inequality could produce and the clearest demonstration of why it was in all our interests to do something about it—in this case, less for our own satisfaction than to prevent war.7 “The root of the problem was this animosity,” says Chambers. “In February 2002, [then secretary of state] Colin Powell spoke to the World Economic Forum and basically said: ‘We will never have peace unless we level the playing field.’ So with my family and the staff at the foundation, we kind of began trying to figure out what we could do to do that.”
Initially, Chambers hit upon the idea of an interfaith conference, bringing together all the world’s religious leaders—Christian, Muslim, Jews, the Dalai Lama—and asking them to appeal to all their followers to lay down their arms, at least for the three to four days of the meeting. After months of negotiations and discussions with faith groups around the world, “we concluded it was a great idea,” says Chambers, “but perhaps not doable.”
After that, says Chambers, “we were kind of groping around” when a friend briefed him on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the eight minimum standards of poverty alleviation and health that, at the turn of the new millennium, 192 members of the United Nations had vowed to make universal by 2015. The eight goals were:1. Halve poverty and hunger.
2. Ensure universal primary education for all.
3. Ensure gender equality at all education levels.
4. Cut child mortality by two-thirds.
5. Cut maternal mortality by three-quarters; ensure all mothers can access reproductive health services.
6. Halt and start to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS and ensure universal treatment for those infected; halt and start to reverse malaria.
7. Promote environmental sustainability, protect biodiversity, halve numbers without access to safe drinking water, and significantly improve the lives of a hundred million slum dwellers.
8. Develop a global partnership for development that includes an open and fair international financial system, cooperating with drug companies and other private businesses to provide drugs and technology to the poor, ease debt, and focus aid on the poorest countries.8
Chambers’s first reaction was: “These are so daunting. These are so unlikely to be achieved.” But his friend left Chambers a card with the MDGs printed on them, and when he looked at them again, Chambers saw signs of something else. Foreign aid was, traditionally, almost the opposite of business—a selfless promise of help, with the emphasis more on intentions than results. But the MDGs contained a limited number of set goals and included a deadline. They were, in effect, a rudimentary business plan. “I began to think: ‘Well, at least these are quantifiable, at least they’re measurable. And a hundred-ninety-something nations have agreed to them.’” There was a looseness to the language and wide scope for interpretation. But maybe, thought Chambers, aid was changing.
As ever, Chambers began gathering data on this new issue. He read through the academic literature on the macroeconomics of health and quickly came across Jeffrey Sachs. “It was clear that Sachs was the originator of the MDGs, so I had some mutual friends introduce us, and I went to visit him at his office at Columbia University. And I loved his intelligence, his energy, his positivity. So I started coming back, and we had a series of meetings over about six months.” Chambers would drill Sachs for information and answers. Sachs, well practiced in his arguments and ready with a thousand examples, became Chambers’s guide through the nuances of global poverty and development—and would challenge Chambers, with all his skills and resources, to do something about it.
Chambers could have had no more evangelical teacher than Sachs. Like Chambers, Sachs had performed something of a midlife reversal. In the 1980s and 1990s, he advised several developing countries, including Bolivia and Poland, on how to implement shock therapy—the rapid implementation of free market reform in economies moving from socialism to capitalism. As Sachs intended, inflation fell, and inefficient, bureaucratic state enterprises either reformed or failed. But incomes also crashed, and unemployment and inequality rose. To his consternation, Sachs found he was making as many enemies as friends in the developing world.
Thereafter, Sachs reinvented himself as a champion of the poor. He campaigned loudly for rapid acceleration of aid. He was outspoken about the need to cancel Third World debt. In 2002, the then UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, appointed him to a new post working out how the world might achieve the MDGs. As a result, Sachs found himself becoming that rarity in the staid profession of economics: a leading expert on the developing world, something close to a celebrity, sought after by governments, billionaires, and Hollywood actors interested in fighting poverty but unsure how to go about it.
Under Sachs’s tutelage, Chambers soon found he was “looking for a business plan to achieve the MDGs, because I didn’t see anything that was simple and direct enough.” His opinion hardened when another friend, Charles McCormack, the CEO of Save the Children USA, told Chambers the various organizations trying to meet the MDGs were a “bunch of musicians playing their tunes, but we don’t have a conductor to bring us all together.” “So,” says Chambers, “Jeff and I kind of formed Millennium Promise to bring them together.”
As he navigated this new world, Chambers began noticing that one issue came up time and again: malaria. Of the eight MDGs, at least three—MDG 6, but also MDGs 4 and 5—could be said to apply to malaria, and possibly MDG 1 as well.
Sachs had also zeroed in on the disease. In his seminal book The End of Poverty, Sachs argued the poorest countries were locked in a poverty trap from which only aid could rescue them. He added that, given advances in medicine and the world’s long experience of how to engineer development, doing that was no longer difficult if only donors had the will. If we did, Sachs claimed extreme poverty—living on $1 or less a day—would be history in twenty years.
Malaria, said Sachs, was a great place to start. The disease was a test of development: each country’s ability to cope with it was a good way to rank its advancement. But did Africa have malaria because it was poor? Or was it that malaria was keeping Africa poor? Sachs said it was both. “Africa’s governance is poor because Africa is poor,” he wrote. Later he calculated malaria cost Africa $12 billion a year in lost output. This, said Sachs, was a downward spiral, and a big reason Africa seemed locked in poverty.
By the same reasoning, fixing malaria would have exponential benefits. It would save lives. And the process of fixing it—of
executing a policy and assessing the results—would also improve systems of government. A malaria-free country, whose victory over the disease had required a better government, would develop more quickly. A more developed country would feed back again into an even more capable state directing its people to further prosperity. In 2000, when he was at Harvard, Sachs conducted a study that found a 10 percent reduction in malaria cases would raise economic growth by 0.3 percent a year.9 This was an upward spiral. It was Africa’s path out of poverty. What’s more, wrote Sachs, it was a good deal. Fixing it would take $3 billion a year, a quarter of its annual cost to Africa’s economy.
Sachs’s arguments made sense to the businessman in Chambers. Fixing malaria was like an investment: it would improve a country’s capabilities and move it out of poverty toward optimism and growth. Chambers also knew that business had much to teach the aid world about efficiency. The pursuit of personal profit may have helped produce the inequality of the 1980s—when billionaires coexisted with the homeless (in the West) and the starving (in Africa and Asia)—that made aid necessary. But Chambers contended that was not, as many aid workers believed, an argument for dispensing with business methods in aid—rather, it was a case for putting such tools to work in aid as well. And here, malaria was an issue that cried out for the right kind of foreign aid—urgent, efficient, not a handout, but a temporary boost to speed a nation toward the day it was able to care for itself.
The issue of malaria also appealed to Chambers’s ideas of enlightened self-interest. Malaria didn’t continue to exist because we couldn’t fix it. Ways of curing it had been known for centuries, and preventing it for decades. Malaria had not been fixed, Chambers realized, because the rich world chose not to. That was the narrow logic of Chambers’s previous incarnation as a winner-takes-all Wall Street titan. Now Chambers believed the rich world should help the poor world in its own interest. It wasn’t so much that inequality was unjustifiable—though extreme disparity clearly was. It was that inequality was unintelligent. Poverty didn’t just hurt the poor. It hurt everyone. A malaria-free Africa would cost the West less in assistance and benefit it more as a trading partner, just as surely as a world in which young Muslims felt less oppressed would be one of fewer terrorist attacks.
Chambers set up a series of meetings with malaria specialists at places like the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization. One person he met was Steven Phillips, an occupational medicine expert at ExxonMobil. “My advice was: ‘We need your leadership,’” says Phillips.
“‘We’ve got to make the international architecture of the various groups dealing with malaria more effective, as they don’t play ball together. We have to vastly ramp up resources. And we have to get African leaders on board, or none of this will be sustainable.’ Ray knew almost nothing about malaria at the time. But he was a quick study, and within six months he’d worked up the Ray Chambers Plan for Malaria that basically applied his three-pillar Newark model to the problem. For political leadership, get President Bush and the African Union. For investors, get people like the Global Fund and the World Bank. Then get the media to come along with their flashbulbs and get everyone committing to malaria in public.”
The signature project for Chambers’s and Sachs’s joint foundation, Millennium Promise, was the Millennium Villages. These were thirteen showcase African villages chosen to host a comprehensive effort to achieve the eight MDGs—to show success was possible and to highlight the benefits. To drum up funding, Sachs and Chambers traveled to Kenya to two of the villages in January 2006 with a small group of potential donors.
Sachs and Chambers were both at pivotal moments in their lives. Sachs was at the height of his influence: he had just finished his report for Annan and in December had published The End of Poverty, which, unusually for an academic tome on development, became an instant best seller and was even excerpted as a cover for Time magazine. Chambers, meanwhile, was seeing malaria for himself for the first time. The experience was powerful confirmation of his view that malaria was, as Basu says, “a nobrainer. He couldn’t think of a reason why the world should not go to work on malaria. He was moved by the suffering, of course, but also by how fixable it was.”
After Kenya, Chambers and Sachs split up. Chambers went on to Uganda. Sachs flew to Malawi and Mozambique to visit other Millennium Villages. A few weeks later, the pair reunited in New York to compare experiences and photographs. “Jeff has this one picture of a room of angelic children, all sleeping,” says Chambers. “And I say, ‘Ah, aren’t they cute?’ But Jeff says: ‘Ray, you don’t understand. They’re all in malarious comas. They’re all dying.’ And they did all die.” Chambers was mortified. But suddenly he knew. “So I said to Jeff: ‘I’d like to kind of come up with some business concepts to see if we can’t save a million children a year.’”
CHAPTER 4
Aiding Who?
There were already hundreds of thousands of people trying to figure out how to save a million children a year, not least their parents. And there were good reasons to think it might be impossible. One was the collapse of the previous campaign. A second, and one of rising significance, was the more generalized failings of all aid, and the increasing criticism to which it was subjected. Covering the 2008–2009 economic crisis, I received a valuable lesson in why foreign assistance was increasingly under fire.
By the end of 2008, the world’s leading aid and development professionals were warning, in an endless stream of speeches and press releases, that the gathering economic crisis would be most damaging to the poor. Through 2009 and 2010, as the depression spread from finance to the real economy, they united in a siren warning: the world was getting poorer, and, for the poorest of the poor, that would mean disaster. The downturn would push tens of millions of people into poverty. It would gut donations. Famines and mass migrations were imminent.
For a journalist, this was a compellingly tragic narrative. Not only were the poorest least able to cope, with a crisis that originated in the rich world they were also least to blame. For months, leaders of the aid world used their authority to make sure the story got out. In an address to a special session of the UN Human Rights Council in February 2009, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said economic decline was likely to “undermine access to work, affordability of food and housing, as well as of water, basic health care and education” and identified “women and children, migrants, refugees, indigenous peoples, minorities and persons with disabilities” as “at the frontlines of hardship . . . and most likely to lose their jobs and access to social safety nets and services.”1 In April, Joy Phumaphi, then vice president for human development at the World Bank, claimed the slump had “taken a wrecking ball to growth and development in the developing world, with children having to drop out of school and poor families eating cheaper, less nutritious food which can result in weight loss and severe malnutrition.”2 The same month World Bank president Robert Zoellick warned of the “human catastrophe” of what he said were fifty-five million to ninety million people then being pushed into poverty, which the Bank measures as a daily income of $1.25 or less.3 As the world’s poorest continent, Africa was a focus of concern. The World Bank’s managing director, former finance minister of Nigeria Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, said the crisis would thrust forty-six million Africans into absolute poverty. International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn went further. “This is not only about protecting economic growth and household incomes,” he said. “It is also about containing the threat of civil unrest, perhaps even war.”4
None of this happened. There was no rise in poverty. The downturn caused no wars and no unrest. Africa not only weathered the recession far better than much of the world but actually got richer. Only South Africa, the continent’s richest country, went briefly into recession. The other forty-seven countries in sub-Saharan Africa kept growing by an average 5.6 percent in 2008, 2 percent in 2009, 5 percent in 2010, returning to a predicted 5.5 percen
t in 2011.5 Least affected by the downturn were the poorest countries. Africa’s twenty-nine low-income countries grew by a healthy 4.5 percent in 2009, when the recession’s impact on the rest of the world was at its highest. And contrary to predictions of slashed aid budgets, assistance rose too. Total global aid went up by 6.8 percent to $119.6 billion in 2009. In 2010, when the US and Britain ring-fenced foreign aid even as they trimmed and slashed spending in almost every other area, it increased again, by another 5 percent to $126 billion.6 In Africa, the focus of much of the concern, aid rose by 3 percent to $27 billion. Spending on health and education in Africa also went up.7
I was among a number of journalists who began asking whether they’d been deceived. And in April 2010, the IMF’s director for Africa, Antoinette Sayeh, did admit the predictions of catastrophe had been flat wrong. “Somewhat surprisingly to some, many of the region’s low-income countries appear to have been less affected,” she said. “[They] escaped fairly lightly in terms of the impact of the crisis. Low-income countries were able then to sustain their growth. In fact, several of the fragile countries were able to accelerate output in 2009.”8
Mistakes can be forgiven if they are innocent or well intentioned, as Sayeh implied. But a little investigation revealed these were neither. The aid world, I discovered, knew by mid-2009 the crisis would barely affect Africa. The truth was contained in its own figures. By June 2009, World Bank managing director Okonjo-Iweala was scaling back her statistics. No longer were forty-six million Africans being pushed into poverty, she said. Now, she told the World Economic Forum on Africa in Cape Town, the figure was more like six million. Likewise, despite Strauss-Kahn’s rhetoric, the IMF was forecasting low-income countries in Africa would grow 4.6 percent in 2009 and fragile countries by 3.1 percent.9
