Nairobi — A remote village in western Kenya could play a key role in determining whether extreme poverty will be substantially reduced worldwide in the next two decades.

Sauri sub-location in Siaya district of Nyanza Province is the site of a potentially historic project led by Jeffrey Sachs, the head of the United Nations' antipoverty programme and author of a much-discussed new book on global development.

Sachs' initiative seeks to demonstrate that even the poorest villages can achieve major gains in living standards within a few years as a result of comparatively modest investments. The Sauri project, the first of about 10 such efforts being undertaken throughout Africa, will test the thesis at the heart of Sachs' book, The End of Poverty.

The globe-trotting economist maintains that the rich world has the capacity to end the extreme poverty now afflicting one-sixth of humanity by the year 2025.

Sachs structures his book as an extended argument for why the most prosperous countries should greatly increase the amounts of development aid they give to countries such as Kenya.

Targeted assistance of the sort being provided to Sauri can lift more than 1 billion human beings out of the depths of poverty, Sachs says.

Sauri was chosen as the proving ground for his thesis because the conditions are typical of much of rural Africa. A recent New York Times story about Sachs' project described the sub-location as "a forgotten place in a country that has seen corruption devastate its national economy."

Sauri's social and economic indicators are uniformly grim. Sachs notes in his book that food production per person is falling, the incidence of malaria is rising, and about a third of local adults are infected with the Aids virus.

Clean water is in short supply in Sauri, which also lacks electricity. And the birth rate remains one of the highest in the world at six children per woman.

To combat what are simultaneously the causes and symptoms of extreme poverty, Sachs proposes a "Big Five" set of development initiatives: agricultural inputs; investments in basic health; investments in education; power, transportation and communication improvements; and provision of safe drinking water and sanitation.

He estimates the total cost of these undertakings at $350,000 a year - or $70 for each of Sauri's 5,000 residents. The sum is relatively small because it covers basic items, including fertilisers, anti-malarial medicines and bed nets, a daily meal for all primary school students, and the purchase of a single lorry and a few mobile phones.

Within a few years, Sachs pre dicts, Sauri should be able to reach the first rung on the "development ladder" that formerly destitute countries such as China and India are now rapidly climbing. "Sooner rather than later," he writes, "these investments would repay themselves not only in lives saved, children educated, and communities preserved, but also in direct commercial returns."

Progress has already begun to occur, reported a New York Times correspondent who visited Sauri earlier this month.

A health clinic has been built by the villagers with materials provided by international aid agencies.

Local farmers are being instructed in proper use of fertilisers to increase crop yields.

Similar projects could be carried out in all the villages of Kenya for a total cost of roughly $1.5 billion, Sachs calculates. At present, he notes, donors provide Kenya with a combined sum of $100 million a year in development aid, while Kenya spends $600 million a year to service its external debt.

The country is, in other words, "being drained by the international community, not bolstered by it," Sachs observes. "This is all the more remarkable," he adds, "since Kenya is a new and fragile democracy that should be receiving considerable help from its development partners."

Simply, in order for Kenya to meet the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals - a more modest set of anti-poverty advances than those envisioned by Sachs - donors will have to provide much greater amounts of aid as well as deeper debt cancellation, Sachs points out.

"Yet when the Kenyan government recently proposed a national social health insurance fund - the very thing needed to scale up access to basic health care - donors quickly objected rather than jumped at the opportunity to examine how it could actually be accomplished."

Sachs, who heads an institute at a US Ivy League university, ranks as a fully credentialled member of the international development elite. Yet he can be scathing in his criticisms of the International Monetary Fund and bold in his refusal to accept the standard explanations for Africa's plight. Corruption, he insists, is not the major cause of the problems besetting Kenya and countries with similarly stalled economies.

Most of Kenya's graft is attributable to "holdouts from the earlier regime," Sachs maintains.

"Part of the corruption is new and completely avoidable," he adds - but only if donors help Kenya improve its public administration, "not by moralising and finger-pointing" but by a series of actions such as job training, higher pay for senior managers, empowerment of villages, and "some humility on the part of the donors."

In support of his claim regarding the relative unimportance of sleaze as an impediment to development, Sachs cites the "corruption perception index" compiled annually by Transparency International. He notes that four poor Asian countries - India, Pakistan, Indonesia and Bangladesh - are advancing economically much faster than four poor African countries - Ghana, Senegal, Mali and Malawi - even though the African four score better than the Asian four on Transparency's corruption scale.

Prevalence of serious disease is a more significant factor in the persistence of poverty, Sachs contends. Malaria and Aids are both much more widespread in sub-Saharan Africa than in other parts of the developing world, he notes.

In Sachs' analysis, such debilitating and life-shortening diseases, coupled with Africa's geographic and climatic disadvantages, have formed a self-reinforcing "poverty trap" that has ensnared Kenya and many other sub-Saharan countries.

But escape is possible, he insists. Just give Kenya the rudiments and let market forces work their magic, declares Sachs, a true believer in capitalism.