Earth Institute

A crowd of students and faculty members shuffled into Miller Theater Tuesday evening for the third annual Sachs student lecture, led by Columbia’s celebrity economist, on the challenges confronting the poverty relief plan known as the Millennium Villages Project.

Malaria is a huge medical problem. Jeffrey Sachs, a well-known professor of sustainable development here at Columbia advocates for the distribution of free bed nets to combat malaria over the continent of Africa. The problem with this plan, however, is precisely what Sachs is best known for: sustainability.

Columbia’s fifth State of the Planet conference kicked off Thursday with a keynote speech by former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and debates sponsored by the Economist that covered topics such as poverty, climate change, and sustainable development.

University President Lee Bollinger has said one of his top priorities is making Columbia a leading institution for the study of Africa. But Columbia’s decentralized initiatives regarding the continent, strewn throughout multiple schools, institutes, and departments with no central oversight, inhibit the University’s goals.

If you are poor, you walk: to school, to collect water, to find firewood, to go to town, to work, to farm your field, to get crops to your family, to get any excess crops you may grow to a market, to buy goods from the store, to get health care, to go to funerals.