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News/Event Item
Kenyan Village Serves as Test Case in Fight on Poverty
4 April 2005
By Marc Lacey
...This settlement in western Kenya, where Ms. Odera lives, has become a giant test tube, and Ms. Okoth's instruction is one part of that experiment. Eventually there will be 10 such test villages, scattered across the world's poorest continent.
Led by Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute of Columbia University, the project aims to fight poverty in all its aspects - from health and education to agriculture and energy in one focused area - to prove that conditions for millions of people like Ms. Odera and her neighbors can be improved in just five years.
It is an important and uncertain gambit. If it fails, initiatives like that pushed recently by Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain to greatly increase foreign aid to Africa may seem foolhardy. If a single village cannot be turned around with focused attention, how can whole communities and even countries be revitalized?
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
For the Full Article, go to:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/04/international/africa/04village.html
The Earth Institute at Columbia University
http://www.earth.columbia.edu/
category: News from Other Sources : General Health News
contributed by Andrea Welch on 5 April 2005
Africa : Kenya
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