While I don't agree with everything Sachs advocates and have a few issues with the conclusions of his latest book, The End of Poverty, I think that his methods really resonate with a particular, and sadly dominant, mindset, and therefore play an important role in the fight against poverty.
The book is worth the read, but a little fat, so if you'd like the abridged version as it was published in Time, you can download it from the Millennium Project site.
When he says things like:
"If we take a proper, hard-headed and businesslike approach to the issues of disease, poverty and hunger, there are practical solutions," Sachs said. "They don't involve blank cheques coming from donor countries to poor countries; they don't involve the other side haranguing poor countries about their poverty."
People who might not normally credit the idea that their "hard earned tax dollars" should be spent on development, tend to actually sit up and listen.
So, maybe, with Sachs teaming up with Bono and the Gateses (Time's Persons of the Year for 2005), development might become a sexy topic at last.
It might already be heading that way, at least in the eyes of the Hollywood machine. There have been a raft of films in the last year or so with development themes as either the central or a side plot line. I'm thinking of last year's Beyond Borders (a less than satisfactory love story set in multiple development contexts and dodging tons of ethical dilemmas along the way) and The Constant Gardner (which we watched the other night and is well worth seeing). I'm sure there have been others, but I just had lunch by the Mekong and my brain is a little droopy.
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