THE IDEALIST Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty

Narrator Susan Nezami presents Munk's six-year study of Jeffrey Sachs and the Millennium Villages Project in Africa. Economist Sachs had the best of intentions when he launched the project with the aim of eliminating poverty by providing financial support to boost the extremely poor into a more sustainable existence. Nezami, in a measured and journalistic tone, details the factors that prompted the Millennium Villages' creation, the project's administrative structure, and the problems that ended up plaguing the effort. Nezami is dispassionate in reporting these challenges as well as Sachs's evolving realization that he had neglected to account for some human factors that could make or break the project as a whole. S.E.G. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine [Published: DECEMBER 2013]