africa

Africa at a Fork in the Road: Taking Off or Disappointment Once Again?
Together these findings imply that people were aware of their own particular constraints.
Some were being held back and unable to achieve higher profits because
they didn’t have access to money. Others, the potential borrowers in the MFI expansion
villagers, did have access to money—they could have borrowed if they had
wanted to, and they chose not to.
28.3 Conclusions
What do we take away from this? It is no surprise that the huge Millennium Challenge
Corporation program did not do a whole lot of good. It fell into exactly what Jim Scott
in his Seeing like a State (one of the best books in development economics) made
clear decades ago. That is, if you don’t take account of heterogeneity—if you give
everybody the same starter pack of a certain fertilizer and a certain seed across the
country—it is not surprising that wonderful things don’t happen. So one lesson that
should not be shocking to us is that large-scale, introduced-from-above, state-led
development programs are going to run into such complexity and are going to fail.
The more positive lesson is that interventions that embrace heterogeneity have the
prospect of succeeding. What plays a crucial role here is markets with prices. For
example, the loans in Mali that farmers chose not to borrow had an interest rate of
25 percent a year, but these farmers’ return on capital wasn’t worth 25 percent a
year, so they opted not to borrow. The people who did borrow were getting those
high returns. Markets are the most obvious example of where people can choose
to participate and bear the cost of doing so, and they embrace heterogeneity. 2
Another example of embracing heterogeneity and not trying to impose a single
model from above is the information and communications technology (ICT) revolution.
One of the most exciting projects that I am involved with now links community
extension agents with extension sector agents in the formal sector through ICT
and videos, which are produced by a local Tamale company with very enthusiastic
farmer actors, who were a delight to watch. Maybe the videos are not Oscar candidates,
but they have generated enormous interest and enthusiasm among farmers
in these communities, and among the extension agents who work with them. The
493