Hubris and international development: A review of Nina Munk’s The Idealist

Abstract

In the mid-2000s, Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia University macroeconomist, famously embarked on a series of village-level interventions in Uganda, Kenya and a number of other locations in his Millennium Villages project. Many of these efforts were multi-pronged investments in a variety of services in agricultural communities, several in chronically arid areas. In The Idealist, the journalist Nina Munk documents these endeavors in a highly accessible book based on years of intense field work with her main protagonist and the project participants and sites themselves (Munk, 2013). Munk is a gifted storyteller, and she embraced a terrific narrative form to tell the story of Sachs and the Millennium Villages. She intersperses coverage of Sachs, who to his credit provided very open access to her, along with the stories of two Millennium Villages staffers, Ahmed Maalim Mohamed and David Siriri, who were intimately involved in project administration in Kenya and Uganda. From their humble upbringings to the rise and fall of their Millennium Villages projects, their stories make the book. She begins Chapter 2: