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Sachs debunks the claim popular among American and European authorities that governmental corruption bars African development. Sachs notes that Asian nations such as Pakistan and Bangladesh, whose governments are widely considered more corrupt than those of Africa, enjoy tremendous economic growth. Corruption, thus, is not the key factor impeding economic development. Nor are postcolonial dilemmas a useful explanation, as Vietnam’s rapid economic expansion makes clear. Poor fiscal policy and lack of trade opportunities certainly play a role in stunting economic progress in developing nations, according to Sachs, but “good governance and market reforms are not sufficient to guarantee growth if the country is in a poverty trap.” The fact that Africa’s economic inferiority existed even prior to the Industrial Revolution—a time when disparities between nations’ gross domestic products (GDPs) were slim—seems to indicate that this stunted growth is due to more than ephemeral policy choices. Something other than poor governance or financial policy must underlie this failure to develop. And this malfunction is widespread not only in time but also in space, engulfing all of tropical Africa—that is, the entire region within the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, or between the Sahara and Kalahari deserts. According to Sachs, the real culprit in Africa’s development failure transcends time: it is the tropical African clime itself.

Poverty and disease perpetuate each other. Tragically, the African geography and climate encourage both. Africa’s lack of navigable rivers and landlocked majority impede trade. Variable rainfall and soil depletion hinder food production. Meanwhile, the malaria paramecium relishes Africa’s ecology. Tropical warmth shortens the pathogen’s “sporogeny,” the process by which, once ingested by a transmitting mosquito, the pathogen migrates back to the mosquito’s salivary glands and becomes transmittable. Shortened sporogeny ensures that the mosquito will transmit the disease before its two-week lifespan ends. In this way, African ecology significantly facilitates malaria transmission. When it comes to HIV/AIDS, however, ecology seems to play little role, and epidemiologists remain uncertain as to why AIDS pervades Africa specifically. Still, given the adolescence of the AIDS epidemic relative to Africa’s longstanding poverty trap, this missing link does not hinder Sachs’ argument; HIV is not the cause of Africa’s ailments, though it surely exacerbates them.

So what does Sachs suggest should be done to combat Africa’s cycle of poverty and disease? His meticulous plan to hoist Africa onto the first rung of development involves improving “the Big Five—agriculture, health and education, electricity, transport and communications, and safe drinking water.” This plan relies on international funding on the order of US$195 billion per year, primarily from the US and other wealthy nations. The overarching theme of Sachs’ Big Five improvement plan is that economic crises can be solved, but only with external funding, a creed similar to that of the UN’s MDG project. The logistics of such a program are easy; the financing, less so.