Soros Hands Over $50 Million

Financier/ philanthropist George Soros said yesterday that he was contributing $50 million big ones to support a sprawling social experiment, organized and led by the economist Jeffrey D. Sachs, that aims to help villages in Africa escape grinding poverty.

Soros’s money will, among other things, pay for fertilizers and improved seeds to raise crop yields, classrooms to improve literacy and health clinics to reduce deaths in 33 villages in 10 African countries. The hope is that poor subsistence farmers will begin earning more income by selling crops at market.

The strategy, which Sachs has been pursuing through his nonprofit group, the Millennium Promise, since 2004, is to tackle the myriad problems of poverty all at once by providing villagers with relatively inexpensive technologies and approaches, including mosquito nets that prevent malaria and stoves with chimneys that reduce deadly indoor air pollution.

Soros’s contribution is a philanthropic departure for him. He has largely focused on fostering democracy and good government. But he said in an interview Tuesday: “It requires the support or at least benevolent attitudes from the governments concerned,” he said. “In my view, most of the poverty in the world is due to bad governance. And whether the project can overcome that is a big question. If it succeeds in 5 of 10 countries and can be scaled up, that would be a tremendous achievement.” Screw the politics. This is the real deal, George baby!

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/13/us/13soros.html?ref=business