As you are returning home to the U.S. from a 10-day study tour of South Africa (what an experience!), your plane had to divert to the country of Mali. You had to stay one night in Mali, in a moderately priced hotel—it seems pretty raunchy at first. As you are having dinner at a sidewalk cafe you notice a 9-year-old girl sitting on a curb across the street wearing torn and dirty clothes. Something about her catches your eye, so when you finish dinner you approach her and strike up a conversation.
She slowly warms up to you and tells you about her predicament. Her family and the fields in their village have been badly disrupted by the recent situations (food insecurity; economic distress, etc.) in the country and they are struggling to make enough to eat. There are few jobs, and she has fallen a year behind in school.
On the plane home the next day you are, coincidentally, seated next to an economic development consultant who is working for the World Bank Emergency Safety Nets project. You tell her the story of this little girl and the consultant gives out a little laugh and tells you that there are hundreds of millions of kids just like that in Africa, and while each child has a tragic story, the best way to address this is not to tend to the individual child but to introduce a food safety micro-level development project.
You ask her how to do that and she replies with a faint smile and then quotes a famous development scholar, Abhijit Banerjee. The consultant basically suggests that you might want to help extend the micro-level development Safety Nets Project in the girl’s village in Mali.
When you get back home, you watch a film about world poverty: The End of Poverty? One friend recommends that you read: Banerjee and Duflo’s book, Poor Economics. You hear about participatory development, and this makes sense: you need to ask the local people, those who are marginalized, how best to help. But then, you read a pretty damning critique of participatory development: Cooke, Bill, “Rules of Thumb for Participatory Change Agents”
You speak to one of your professors and she tells you that there are all kinds of structural violence in that part of the world: from colonialism, vestiges of slavery, class hierarchies, poverty, misogyny, etc.
This makes sense, as does the development literature talking about poverty traps, conflict traps, education traps, resource traps, etc.
Instructions
Write a 3-page essay reflecting upon the World Bank’s food safety micro-level development project [ Safety Nets Project (Links to an external site.)] in Mali. Draw upon the micro-level poverty reduction arguments from Poor Economics, relevant ideas from Bill Cooke, “Rules of Thumb for Participatory Change Agents,” and ideas concerning poverty reduction from The End of Poverty?
Undergraduates: Your reflections should describe the basic goals of the micro-level development project in Mali (1 ½-spaced–11 pt font)
NO outside research sources beyond the World Bank Emergency Safety Nets project link is required
Links: https://projects.worldbank.org/en/projects-operations/project-detail/P127328
https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2021/Overview/
https://dashboards.sdgindex.org/profiles/mali/indicators
file:///Users/rawfe/Downloads/JHR598.MurphyErfani,J.F01%20(1).pdf
file:///Users/rawfe/Downloads/Poor_Economics_A_Radical_Rethinking_of_the_Way_to_…_—-_(1_Think_Again,_Again).pdf
file:///Users/rawfe/Downloads/Poor_Economics_A_Radical_Rethinking_of_the_Way_to_…_—-_([_PART_I_]_Private_Lives).pdf
file:///Users/rawfe/Downloads/Poor_Economics_A_Radical_Rethinking_of_the_Way_to_…_—-_([_PART_I_]_Private_Lives)%20(1).pdf
