Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org where you can

subscribe, comment on this podcast, and find links and other information related to today's

conversation. We'll also find our archives where you can listen to every episode we've ever

done going back to 2006. Our email address is mailadycontalk.org. We'd love to hear from you.

Today is March 6, 2014, and my guest is Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University.

Jeff, welcome back to Econ Talk. Great to be with you, Russ. Thanks a lot.

Our topic for today is poverty and the Millennium Villages Project, your ambitious effort to

reduce poverty in some of the poorest parts of the world, and ideally to become a model for much

wider efforts. I want to start with just the basic idea behind the Millennium Villages Project.

What makes it different from other aid projects? The idea is to achieve the Millennium

Development Goals. Explain what those are and where they come from. Absolutely. In September 2000,

the member states of the UN, the world's governments agreed on eight development objectives for

the period 2000 to 2015, to fight poverty and hunger, to get kids in school, to promote gender

equality, to reduce maternal and child mortality, to fight diseases like AIDS and malaria,

to ensure access to safe drinking water and sanitation, and to enable poor countries to

take up new technologies, especially information technologies, and to have an effective partnership

with the rest of the world. So the purpose of the Millennium Villages Project is to actually

help these very poor communities, 10 main sites in 10 countries in Africa, and now because of the

expanding number of places around Africa, to achieve the Millennium Development Goals,

and to learn from that experience of new approaches to fighting hunger, poverty, disease,

literacy, and the other problems of extremely poor communities.

...