I found the Millennium Village Simulator very interesting and informative. At first I started with both Kodjo and Fatou having full health and allocated my hours to start making a little money off of the surplus of food I made. However as I started to try to adjust the hours I spent on the family tasks to make more money, I quickly lost health or did not have enough water or nourishment for both Kodjo and Fatou. Very quickly the simulation became much harder than I originally thought it would be, which I am assuming is the point behind the simulation. It is very hard to decide how to allocate resources when your resources are so scarce. I found it hard to decide what to spend my hours doing when my health kept going down and my maize crop was bad season after season. Additionally I found it hard to balance how much to tax the community and restrict certain resources, such as wood, when they were becoming depleted. At one point I realized that there was an option to attempt to have a child which I did not even consider because I was already struggling to make enough food for just Kodjo and Fatou and did not have a lot of money to spend on a child. Ultimately both Kodjo and Fatou died much quicker than I thought they would and it felt like there was almost nothing I could do to avoid it.
This simulation made me think of my Justice and Civil Society class where we have previously talked about poverty traps meaning people who lack the capital to make an income which makes it very hard to even “get your foot on the ladder” to get out. I definitely felt that with this simulation. There was not enough hours for me to allocate to the various tasks to make enough money to buy helpful products and maintain good health to elevate the quality of life of Kodjo and Fatou and the larger community.
I did not make the connection to the poverty traps discussed in Justice and Civil Society. However, now that you have enlightened me the connection makes perfect sense. I felt as if I failed the simulation before I could even get started.
What you said about the poverty trap is really interesting, and it goes along the lines of some of the things I was thinking about while doing the simulation. How can anyone make their way out of a situation that bad? It was impossible to keep Kodjo and Fatou alive, and that should be the very bare minimum. If people in sub-Saharan Africa have these issues, I don’t see how they can focus on getting out of poverty when they don’t even have enough food to eat or clean drinking water. The worst part is that I can’t think of anyway to solve this problem effectively, and even if there is a solution, it is unfortunately very long term.