tisiwoota

Really. That’s the goal of the Millennium Villages Project, a UN plan led by economist Jeffrey Sachs [you know, the guy Bono calls his “professor“].

Via AdamSmithee, I found a NY Times article on the village of Sauri in Kenya, which will receive $250,000 a year over the next five years for agricultural, educational and health programs.

The project will eventually expand to 10 villages. It will be a highly visible way of demonstrating that aid can be used effectively, and should help counteract the perception held by some donors that development programs in Africa inevitably fall prey to corruption and mismanagement. Sachs has been very critical of donor’s attitudes in this regard. As Sachs told AllAfrica.com, “[W]hen the Kenyan government recently proposed a national social health insurance fund - the very thing needed to scale up access to basic health care - donors quickly objected rather than jumped at the opportunity to examine how it could actually be accomplished.”

“In support of his claim regarding the relative unimportance of sleaze as an impediment to development, Sachs cites the “corruption perception index” compiled annually by Transparency International. He notes that four poor Asian countries - India, Pakistan, Indonesia and Bangladesh - are advancing economically much faster than four poor African countries - Ghana, Senegal, Mali and Malawi - even though the African four score better than the Asian four on Transparency’s corruption scale.”

In another interview, Sachs makes this analogy about the history of aid in Africa:

“If you have a block of blazing buildings on fire and you send one fireman and he sprays the hose and the fire continues, you shouldn’t make the conclusion, ‘We did the best we could, (we have) no more use for firemen, they are not effective’. Maybe we should conclude that we should have made more of an effort to stop this fire from spreading.”

…

I would interested to learn more about how the Millennium Villages Project is run, and what sort of input the local population has in determining how the funds are directed.

Oh this is fabulous: John Cleese is going to be writing the script for a new Wallace and Gromit clay-mation movie. It will be a pre-historic comedy about human tribes.

As much as I dislike propagating objectification… the following adult site is too funny not to pass on:

“Have you ever fantasized about a room full of sexy college coeds sweating over a match of Strip-Counterstrike; or perhaps you long to see young, bikini-clad sweethearts slaving away with soldering irons, installing mod-chips in their home consoles? …We’ve scoured the web looking for the hottest, tech-savvy girl geeks the world has to offer.”

Geek Fantasies offers several free teaser clips. Number 4 features one of said bikini-clad sweethearts caressing a calculator, tapping a few keys with bright red nails, then cooing: “This equation has been… satisfied.”

Another clip has her fondling a 12-sided die over a table of D&D figures.

Ridiculous.

In the news today, Pascal Lamy of France has prevailed over candidates from developing countries to become the next director general of the WTO.

There is concern that this might worsen the growing rift between developed and developing countries in the WTO. In particular, developing countries worry that someone from a developed country with powerful agricultural interests would be unlikely to do much in the way of cutting back agricultural subsidies, which often spur overproduction and depress prices for crops, making it difficult for developing countries to compete.