Thank you to our faculty adviser Jenna Davis for coming in to talk with us on Wednesday for our final seminar! It was an interesting discussion about success and failure (in shades of grey) for projects by development organizations. This may be a touchy subject for some, but it was made clear by Professor Davis and David Damberger in his “What happens when an NGO admits failure” TED talk that openly addressing failures is crucial to moving forward. Though it may be personally embarrassing to confront your “failed” project, may cause your employer organization to lose face, may make the client community less likely to work with you again, or may even cause some damage (hopefully not), there really couldn’t be a more effective way of learning and having your eyes opened to things you previously missed. Failure here can be defined as infrastructure breakdown, or rejected proposals, or essentially any project that does not achieve the desired results and turns out to be at least a partial waste of time and effort. One of the worst failures of all would be (as pointed out) to repeat the same mistakes that led to the abandonment and breakdown of the same or similar project years before, as has certainly occurred before. Learning about the failure of large organizations and small groups as well is both reassuring and cautionary. No one is infallible…but we have been forewarned so there are things we should be very aware of going in.
One subject that I appreciated hearing about was how to tell if people are even interested in your project. We need to put our project through certain demand filters to gauge involvement. People can demonstrate commitment through participating in training, giving their time in other ways, contributing labor, donating or involving their land, and even making and agreeing to contracts. We also discussed the resources that may be necessary to keep the project going after we have left, those being: money, local skills, spare parts, incentives to stay involved, accountability, and government and/or market support. These are great things to keep in mind going into these projects, to make them as truly sustainable as possible.
Stanford Anam City Project | Nigeria 