Practical Insights on Failure
Failure is the f-word in international development. Unspoken in polite company, yet a reality we all must face.
Failure in International Development
We often work in failed states, in market failure economies, on intractable problems that have stymied others for decades, if not centuries. How arrogant or foolish of us to expect success 100% of the time?
But if you read our project reports, we have “uneven successes”, “lessons learned”, and every other euphemism we can imagine just to keep from saying one simple word: failure.
Project Failure Examples
We are on a mission to make failure acceptable in development discussions. There is great value in examining our mistakes and learning from failure as we go beyond the easy and the simple.
Let’s navel-gaze at where we have all gone wrong in international development:
Published on: Nov 01 2018 by Guest Writer - Comments Off on 9 Lessons Learned in Rolling Out Dimagi’s Mobile Device Management Pilot
Enumerators, who are people like you and I, like to download Candy Crush, Facebook, YouTube videos, mobile screen savers, to their mobile phones, and use up significant...
I can’t count the number of times I’ve been in a discussion that quickly shifts from a failing ICT for Education initiative, to the assumed root cause:...
Published on: Jun 06 2018 by Wayan Vota - Comments Off on 9 Lessons Learned From Failed ICTforAg Interventions
The potential for ICTs in agricultural development is almost endless and numerous applications are being developed and deployed. However, whilst everyone would...
Starting with the Principles for Digital Development, we now have principles for many development sectors,and principles for cross-cutting themes, including principles...
We’ve all heard of Esoko, the ICTforAg company specializing in market prices for farmers. Starting in Ghana in 2007, then expanding across West Africa and...
The Electronic Cash Transfer Learning Action Network (ELAN) works to improve the effectiveness and impact of digital payments in humanitarian response. Within this...
What day-to-day failures do you expect to happen most in your ICT4D projects? Laptop theft? Viruses? Outright malfeasance? I worry every day about the risks to...
In early 2015, I had a brilliant idea. I thought we could use sensors to have an impact on hypertension, which is a leading cause of heart attacks, stroke, sepsis,...
Published on: Oct 31 2016 by Guest Writer - Comments Off on Lessons From a MERL Tech Confessional: It’s All About Assumptions
It’s been said that good science is the art of getting less wrong over time. Maybe the same principle applies to the use of technology for monitoring, evaluation,...
Last Thursday night, we had the 5th Annual Fail Festival DC, and by the tweets and photos it was an amazing event. Woven into the fun were several strong lessons...