The Problem With International Development and a Plan to Fix It

The Problem With International Development and a Plan to Fix It(newrepublic.com)

29 points by specialk 11 years ago | 9 comments

cpks 11 years ago |

> The repeated “success, scale, fail” experience of the last 20 years of development practice suggests something super boring: Development projects thrive or tank according to the specific dynamics of the place in which they’re applied. It’s not that you test something in one place, then scale it up to 50. It’s that you test it in one place, then test it in another, then another. No one will ever be invited to explain that in a TED talk.

Perhaps. That model works very well in Silicon Valley. It's just that the expectation is that most projects will fail. Development projects are similar, only with an unrealistic expectation of success early on, and without appropriate processes to fail fast, recover money from failures, etc.

What I'd like to see is fundraising with:

* Big figures * Long-term windows * Milestones

In other words, I raise $10 million as $2 million per year, contingent on meeting specific milestones. Or $200k/$1 million/$4 million. Or whatever. As a fundraiser, I have a strong interest to write realistic plans -- not just grandiose but impractical visions -- since if I fail to execute, I lose funding. I also have a confirmed, steady, long-term source of funding, so I'm not spending 90% of my time selling.

If I do fail, the money is recovered.

wozniacki 11 years ago | |

  In 2010, “Frontline” returned to the schools where they had filmed children 
  laughing on the merry-go-rounds, splashing each other with water. They 
  discovered pumps rusting, billboards unsold, women stooping to turn the wheel
  in pairs. Many of the villages hadn’t even been asked if they wanted a 
  PlayPump, they just got one, sometimes replacing the handpumps they already
  had. In one community, adults were paying children to operate the pump. 

  Let’s not pretend to be surprised by any of this. The PlayPump story is a sort
  of Mad Libs version of a narrative we’re all familiar with by now: Exciting new
  development idea, huge impact in one location, influx of donor dollars, quick
  expansion, failure.

Frontline Video from 2005 "The Play Pump" :

http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/watch/player.html?pkg=entr...

Frontline Video from 2010 "Troubled Water" :

http://video.pbs.org/video/1533347949/

cpks 11 years ago | | |

And it cost $15 million.

The annual cost of product failures in the US is $100 billion.

Big whoop. PlayPump is 0.1% of that. Your share of the PlayPump (assuming equal cost to everyone in the US)? A nickel. You don't just fund a PlayPump. You fund a thousand PlayPumps. Nine hundred fail, and one hundred have impact.

Someone tried to do good. Perhaps they didn't succeed. What happened as a result? They got ridiculed. That's the failure of PlayPump. Not the folks who did it, but the folks in 2010 mocking them. It brings about a culture which doesn't take risks, and that's a culture which cannot bring about change in the world.

notahacker 11 years ago | |

The Silicon Valley "success, scale, fail" process doesn't work in Silicon Valley either if you look at average long term returns to average VC investors, rather than all the positive side effects.

The difference is that the returns from successfully scaling up in SV make those successes glaringly obvious and desirable to emulate

Scaling up across 105 more villages, on the other hand, simply produces more anecdotes for the pitch deck for the next wave of funding, which will need a bigger amount (and face a greater chance of it being hampered by evidence of something, somewhere having gone wrong). Appropriate milestones and accurate measurement are as much a part of the problem as the solution. Imagine gauging the relative suitability of an early Pets.com and Amazon for follow on funding not from their sales, SV style, but by interns flying out to foreign lands to quiz villagers on how their purchases had improved their quality of life.

ggchappell 11 years ago |

Interesting article. Worth reading all the way through.

FTA:

On the contrary, I think this idea would be an excellent topic for a TED talk.

jasode 11 years ago | |

I think you missed the journalist's jaded sarcasm embedded in "No one will ever be invited to explain that in a TED talk."

I'm guessing TED has had 50+ presentations on "solutions" for Africa over the last 5 years. We'd expect that some of the ideas have failed to deliver. However, we can't expect TED organizers to give stage time to followup presentations explaining why they failed (or why the ideas at smaller scope didn't scale up to large one like they hoped.)

So yes, we would get more value out of hard-hitting TED talks explaining warts and difficulties but we can't expect TED themselves to highlight it. A similar concept is "publication bias" against negative or non-repeatable research results:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias#Definition

danieltillett 11 years ago |

I found the most interesting part the gaming of the system by the aid agencies to hide their overheads to hit the required 10% level.

ommunist 11 years ago |

Nice article. I especially like the revolutionary idea that deworming pupils does not affect their school performance. Yes, human development is the thing that has to be fixed. But dreaming smaller is not going to fix that. Working harder - can, but it is not that much attractive.

Disclaimer: I have been involved in development projects feted by JICA.

In 2010, “Frontline” returned to the schools where they had filmed children laughing on the merry-go-rounds, splashing each other with water. They discovered pumps rusting, billboards unsold, women stooping to turn the wheel in pairs. Many of the villages hadn’t even been asked if they wanted a PlayPump, they just got one, sometimes replacing the handpumps they already had. In one community, adults were paying children to operate the pump. Let’s not pretend to be surprised by any of this. The PlayPump story is a sort of Mad Libs version of a narrative we’re all familiar with by now: Exciting new development idea, huge impact in one location, influx of donor dollars, quick expansion, failure.

"Even in countries with no roads to speak of, Mercedes service is available – often to the exclusion of things like food – thanks to all the US foreign aid, the IMF, and World Bank money being shipped in. It is no secret that this money is aimed at nourishing only those corrupt enough to get their hands on it, while at the same time fattening the bureaucrats on both sides of the transaction who diligently work the trough. And none of them is driving a Chevy. I knew much of this from my last trip. The upcoming trip, especially as it took us through Africa, would be an eye-opening education into the workings of the latest foreign aid scam: the nongovernmental organization, or NGO. As an American taxpayer, I would be amazed to discover that a lot of the money we send to these countries goes to support Mercedes and BMW dealers and various Swiss bankers." "After cocoa, the commodity produced in greatest abundance in the Ivory Coast is to be found in the commercial capital, Abidjan, one of the more cosmopolitan cities in West Africa: NGO bureaucrats. They grow here in enormously high concentration, even for Africa. They and their like have been directing Africa’s destiny for centuries. One might wonder why so many national boundaries in these parts consist of straight lines. In Germany in 1884, at what was called the Congress of Berlin, the European powers came together and divided up Africa. They paid no attention to religious, ethnic, linguistic, tribal, national, or historical differences – the Ivory Coast, for example, is divided between a majority Muslim population in the north and those who hold to indigenous beliefs and Christianity in the south, explaining why peace in Africa may be far away. And why there will always be work for Western bureaucrats." [1]

There is a double standard at work here. I’ve heard people calling on the government to shut down some aid program if one dollar of corruption is found. On the other hand, four of the past seven governors of Illinois have gone to prison for corruption, and to my knowledge no one has demanded that Illinois schools be shut down or its highways closed. [2]