Confronting failure is tough. There’s a tendency to bury failure and hide it. In the for-profit sector, failure tends to be pretty obvious. You know how well an investment firm is doing because they have to publish their numbers. A tech company that bombs is quickly recognized as such. The social sector is well known for being risk averse, and this creates incentives to only discuss successes (or to portray borderline or failing efforts as successful).
I believe that we need to embrace failure. Better to have failed boldly on occasion to have never dared at all. The world’s problems are too big and important to be addressed solely with timid measures.
Earlier this year, I and the leadership of our humanitarian Landmine Detector Program made the decision to put the project on ice. Ted Driscoll, a noted serial entrepreneur now turned venture capitalist, had been working to create an affordable humanitarian landmine detector from military-funded explosives detection technology. We did some great market research about real-world challenges facing deminers, and published an extensive report on what we found.
However, we went almost two years believing that we would have access to this technology imminently. Finally, we had to confront the fact that it wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. In the six months since we put this on the back burner, we still haven’t received access to the technology.
Learning
With the support of our largest funder of the project, the Lemelson Foundation, we decided to document the lessons we learned from this experience, in an essay. I was very pleased about Lemelson’s willingness to both knowingly bet on our riskiest project and be open to distributing our post mortem.
It would be tempting to come up with a single reason that this didn’t work out. But it isn’t that simple. Read the essay if you want to know more.
I am an independent microcredit practitioner, and go where I’m asked by an organisation on the ground to train a local person to run a programme. A few years ago I was asked by an English county council twinned with Eastern Cape to start up a programme as part of a big capacity-building project with a particular municipality, funded by the Commonwealth local government good practice scheme. The woman chosen to run it was exceptional, we had a wonderful external evaluation, and some 500 women joined the scheme. It went well for a time until the municipality director changed, and political jealousies entered into the equation. The worker was forbidden to go out into the villages, and so could not collect the money.
One of the main problems was the extreme distance between the villages we were working in; the municipality had promised to provide transport (there is no public transport to some areas), but even at the beginning was unreliable. Hitch hiking was OK but not for great distances as it was impossible to promise to be there on time. We could not be unreliable when asking for discipline from our clients.
Learning
The programme has ceased. We have taken it away from the municipality and it is now under the umbrella of an NGO. The worker is passionate about the programme, and is still in touch with many of the women, but fundraising to start again is tough, because we are viewed as having failed. I never wanted to work with local government!
Several years ago I found an Ayurveda herbalist who lives in a rural village in India. I was looking online for an herbal treatment for one of my patient’s son who had been suffering with severe constipation for 5 years.
This Ayurveda practitioner told me to have the boy drink a cup of warm milk with a tablespoon of ghee each night before bed. It worked like a miracle. I started suggesting other American and European mothers email her for help for their kids. They did and were very happy with her suggestions.
Then I suggested she start an online practice so that she could get paid for her work with these people. I am a Chinese herbalist specializing in helping women get pregnant and the women find me on the internet and live all over the world. I have made a good living like this and knew that she could too. She needed money and was thrilled with the suggestion.
I used all my knowledge of how to create a successful online practice. I created and promote a website for her. I told her what should go into the email correspondences between the mothers and her. I told her how much to charge and how to ask for payment. I felt very excited and proud of myself for helping her increase her income. I went to India to teach her everything she needed to know about maintaining the website and the online practice.
When I got there I found out what a failure it was. The doctor loved the website but she said she felt like a fraud and couldn’t use it. She thought the site looked “American”. She thought the website gave the impression that she was more impressive than she felt. She didn’t have the confidence to use the website even though she had written all the text. She also didn’t feel comfortable asking a reasonable “Western” fee even though I gave her a script to use when asking and when she used the script she got paid. She felt more comfortable plodding along promoting her work on the web in a way that didn’t bring her the income she needed and probably never would.
Learning
The failure came from me not taking HER personality or cultural expectations into consideration. I had my American “let’s make this venture produce $$” attitude and never thought about her reality.
As many of you know, I have been working in Ghana since 1997. I’ve spent some 20 months there, though it has been a while since I was last on the ground (I need to change that) – basically, the last meaningful research trip I took was in the summer of 2006. That work, along with the fieldwork that came before it, was so rich that I am still working through what it all means – and it has led me down the path of a book about why development doesn’t work as we expect, and now a (much more academic) complete rethinking of the livelihoods framework that many in development use to assess how people make a living.
One of my big findings (at least according to some of my more senior colleagues) is that inequality and (depending on how you look at it) injustice are not accidental products of “bad information” or “false consciousness” in livelihoods strategies, but integral parts of how people make a living (article to this effect here, with related work here and here, as well as a long discussion in Delivering Development). One constraint specific to the livelihoods in the villages in which I have been working is the need to balance the material needs of the household with the social requirement that men make more money than their wives. I have rich empirical data demonstrating this to be true, and illustrating how it plays out in agricultural practice (which makes up about 65% of most household incomes).
In other words, I know damn well that men get very itchy about anything that allows women to become more productive, as this calls one of the two goals of existing livelihoods strategies into question. Granted, I figured this out for the first time around 2007, and have only very recently (i.e. articles in review) been able to get at this systematically, but still, I knew this.
And I completely overlooked it when trying to implement the one village improvement project with which I have been involved. Yep, I totally failed to apply my own lessons to myself.
What happened? Well, to put it simply, I had some money available after the 2006 fieldwork for a village improvement project, which I wanted the residents of Dominase and Ponkrum to identify and, to the extent possible, design for themselves. We had several community meetings that meandered (as they do) and generally seemed to reflect the dominant voices of men. However, at the end of one of these meetings, one of my extraordinarily talented Ghanaian colleagues from the University of Cape Coast had the experience and the awareness to quietly wander off to a group of women and chat with them. I noticed this but did not say anything. A few minutes later, he strolled by, and as he did he said to me “we need to build a nursery.” Kofi had managed to elicit the womens’ childcare needs, which were much more practical and actionable than any other plans we had heard. At the next community meeting we raised this, and nobody objected – we just got into wrangling over details. I left at the end of the field season, confident we could get this nursery built and staffed.
Learning
Five years later, nothing has happened. They formed the earth blocks, but nobody cleared the agreed-upon area for the nursery. It was never a question of money, and my colleagues at the University of Cape Coast checked in regularly. Each time, they left with promises that something would get going, and nothing ever did. I don’t fault the UCC team – the community needed to mobilize some labor so they would have buy-in for the project, and would take responsibility for the long-term maintenance of the structure. This is on the community – they just never built it.
And it wasn’t until yesterday, when talking about this with a colleague, that I suddenly realized why – childcare would lessen one demand on women that limits their agricultural productivity and incomes. Thus, with a nursery in place women’s incomes would surely rise . . . and men have no interest in that, as this is not the sort of intervention that would drive a parallel increase in their own incomes. I have very robust data that demonstrates that men move to control any increase in their wives incomes that might threaten the social order of the household, even if that decreases overall household income and access to food.
So why, oh why, did I ever think that men would allow this nursery to be built? Of course they wouldn’t.
I can excuse myself between 2006-2008 for missing this, as I was still working through what was going on in these livelihoods. But for the last three years I knew about this fundamental component of livelihoods, and how robust this aspect of livelihoods decision-making really is, even under conditions of change such as road construction. I have been looking at how others misinterpret livelihoods and design/implement bad interventions for years, all the while doing that very thing myself.
We’re rolling out Failure Reports at PDT. I began drafting the guidelines for staff to draft their contributions, and then stopped and decided failure starts at the top. Therefore, before asking them to write something, I opted to get the ball rolling myself. I made a list of what PDT’s doing wrong as viewed from the 30,000′ level and I shared it with Jennifer (our Deputy Director) and a few of the managers who added some more items. Then I sent the letter below to the PDT team. Our next reports will be more focused on operational problems with a strong focus on proposed solutions. But, it’s a start.
Failure Report 1.0
Dear Colleagues:
As I wrote earlier this month, PDT will be issuing an organization-wide failure report early next year along the lines of those provided by Engineers Without Borders. We are still refining the guidelines. Inspired by Cornell West, who asked “Yes it’s failure, but how good a failure?, we want a template that focuses on learning from these mistakes. So, in the spirit of failing well, I’ve chosen to draft our first report from the perspective of PDT’s management.
Please note this important disclaimer: The failures listed in this report don’t belong to the PDT staff. They belong to me and Jennifer and the rest of the leadership at HQ. Our people in the field do amazing work under difficult and often dangerous conditions. Each of the shortcomings listed is due to decisions or direction that came from the people at the top of the org chart.
Our biggest accolades come for our Peace Dividend Marketplace projects that have redirected over $600m into the economies of Afghanistan, Haiti, and Timor. There are two problems with this. First, we really don’t know how much of that would have been spent in the local economies without our intervention. In some cases, we have not redirected, but accelerated international spending. For example, the donors would have spent several months trying to find a local vendor, but we helped them find it in a couple of weeks. Both outcomes are economically beneficial, but without being able to accurately distinguish the two it is very hard to measure the actual impact of these projects. This isn’t good enough. Going forward, we need to implement a new component to our results tracking systems that also looks at the nature of the contracts being tendered.
The second problem with our Marketplace projects is that we track the gross economic impact of foreign spending, instead of the net impact. As you all know, $1m of donor money spent buying Chinese desks from a Kabul vendor is not the same as $1m spent in Helmand buying vegetables from a local farmer. Frankly, the latter will probably have a bigger economic impact than the former. It will create more jobs, and possibly even greater tax revenue and GDP growth. But we don’t have a grip on how to accurately analyze the direct effects of increased local spending, and the gross dollar figure approach is too crude. It distorts how we measure the true economic benefit of our activities, and it leads to prioritizing large dollar value spending that may have very low local benefit, and it entirely ignores job creation. Furthermore, we definitely can’t predict impact in advance that would allow us to efficiently focus the project activities. We need to be far better at this. With the expansion of our Economist team, Jennifer and I have asked that we develop a methodology for this analysis and that it be rolled out across our various country programs.
Related to 1 & 2 above, we don’t do nearly enough impact measurement. It would be easy to blame the donors here, since for the most part they only care that we measure process: Budget performance, number of training sessions held, etc. But PDT believes passionately in enhancing impact through better data. We need to focus more of our resources on this. If we did, we could show that some of our projects are indeed producing remarkable results in terms of poverty reduction or job creation, but that others are simply not worth the effort (and then cut those projects to work elsewhere.) For new projects, we will write into the contribution agreements impact measurement activities and clauses to ensure that the project will be primarily judged on those metrics.
Perhaps one of our biggest failures is our fundraising strategy. We have grown far too dependent on government donor agencies. This has slowed us down and made us more process driven. Our “unrestricted funding”, the money we can spend on finding and testing new ideas, is tiny. We should have been focusing on this far more, far earlier. With all the good press we’ve gotten, I should have been working far harder on turning that into financial support. In reality, we only started looking for private funders in the last 12 months! In the first quarter of 2011 we will be hiring a Development Director who will work directly with me to review and overhaul our funding strategy and activities.
We’ve ignored the lessons learned by others. A lot of the “new ideas” that PDT develops aren’t actually new. Someone else in the aid industry thought of it before and tried it elsewhere. We need to put far more energy into ferreting this out. It will allow us to a) give credit where credit is due, b) focus our precious resources on genuinely new ideas, and c) build on the experience of others to fine tune or further innovate these concepts. How can we fix this? Partly we need to be more curious and more energetic in our research. Jennifer and I may also put up a big sign in the New York bullpen that reads “Great idea. Now find out who thought of it first.”
We have wasted far too much time (and readily available donor money), measuring the “economic impact of aid”. That work was important and useful and groundbreaking 5 years ago when the Economic Impact of Peacekeeping initiative showed that only a small fraction of international spending was going into the local economy. But now, it’s not new. It’s not surprising. And it’s very safe to extrapolate the data collected in Liberia in 2007 to estimate the donor footprint in country x in 2010. But the donors keep offering to pay for another study, so we keep doing it. We need to stop. Aid is rarely made more effective by the production of yet another study. We’ve already cut some of these projects out of our pipeline. Going forward, we will ensure that new economic analysis projects clearly move the research forward in obvious ways.
Our staffing systems are really lagging. To be fair, we’ve doubled in size almost every year over the last 6 years. This creates strains on our administrative processes. But still, if we want to keep our good people, and find more people like them, we need to be faster, smarter, and better on how we look after the PDT team. (This isn’t the fault of our HR team. They’ve been crying for more resources to do this, and I promise I’ll find them!) In the new year we will look at some new support structures for field teams and budget for additional resources in the HR unit.
PDT’s communications efforts are terrible, I mean truly painfully awful. Have you seen our website? Or noticed that we have multiple websites? Our print material is even worse. We’ve spent so much time focused on the “doing” senior leadership (i.e. me) has totally forgotten about the “telling and advocating”. Our project staff are understandably frustrated by this, and even more frustrated because we keep promising to fix this. They need not only a plan, but a clear message, and assistance from HQ on how to deliver it. The fix for this can’t be summarized in a sentence. Early in the new year our new Communications Director will be circulating a detailed plan for not just fixing this problem but for implementing an aggressively innovative new approach for comms.
We are too quick to criticize others. For example, just yesterday I took a cheap shot at Bob Geldoff in a newspaper interview (sorry Bob, we love you). I agree that some folks in the aid industry deserve all the criticism we can shovel on them. But in more cases there are complex and intractable reasons why projects, NGOs, and donors behave the way they do. We need recognize this, and be far less eager to blame the entities, but rather we should blame the industry wide conditions and norms that not only tolerate failure, but in some cases encourage it. To be frank, I’m not sure if we’re going to get better at this. But, perhaps, if we are quick to criticize ourselves it won’t seem quite so bad.
Unbelievably, we have almost no Knowledge Management system. We have a shared intranet, where important documents are stored, but nothing that actually functions well. While we rail about the importance of the aid industry and the UN capturing what Donald Rumsfeld called the “known knowns”, we have failed to systematically capture our own knowledge. This makes it especially hard on our project staff who often are forced to “figure it out” without the benefit of knowing that another PDT staffer did exactly that, in the same project, 2 years earlier. Jennifer and I will be talking to you, our IT team, and others to first determine the scope of our needs, and then to propose some solutions.
Related to the previous failure, PDT has been embarrassingly hypocritical in demanding reforms in the aid industry that we haven’t implemented ourselves. Here are just two examples. We’ve argued for years that the aid industry should bring in performance bonuses to reward excellence and encourage innovation. We also have tried to convince the UN to offer more staff recognition awards to highlight the best practices of their field staff. But in both cases, PDT has planned but failed to roll out similar programs internally. And refer back to items 1 through 3 above. We demand more data and analysis, but we don’t do enough of it ourselves. How do we fix this? By being more self-aware. By reminding ourselves that as we grow, we will draw the same scrutiny we apply to others. And by using that scrutiny as an opportunity to not only advocate for innovation, but also demonstrate innovation.
We welcome your comments and look forward to working with you to fix these failures in the year ahead.
Charity Ngoma speaks about her work as Sector Coordinator with PROFIT Zambia. Admitting and addressing failures allowed her project to meet farmer needs and successfully improve veterinary services in Zambia.
Transcript
Good evening. My name is Charity Ngoma. I’m from Lusaka, Zambia.
I work for a project called PROFIT. PROFIT is a USAID-funded program started in 2004 but we only started to go out and do interventions in 2005.
For those that are from Zambia, I think we have heard a huge publicity about PROFIT and what it has done to improve the private sector. It is perceived as a successful project.
But I want to draw the crowd this evening to a different thing: How did we get to where we are? It hasn’t been very rosy. I think people read our reports and they come to PROFIT and say “Oh, you guys are doing a great job.” But it has not been that great.
In 2005, when we started – I mean after being interviewed, given the job, the package was good, they sent in for a grant, we were young, from university, just thinking we were going to change the whole industry – we wanted to change Zambia.
We started and went out with our big books and talked to farmers about what we thought we were going to do. It was good because we had all the energy. We had all the incentives waiting for us and with good pay and vehicles and everything. So we were all out to do a good job. But it didn’t work like that.
In 2005, as sector coordinator, I was supposed to help vets and farmers come up with an intervention that was going to help promote vet services. It worked well. We talked to the vets. The vets bought our idea. We talked to the farmers. The farmers were saying “Oh great, finally we are going to save our animals.” And we said to the vets, “You can sell this package, and it will give you lots of money.”
But that package had one thing: farmers needed to pay for the vet service well in advance, a year in advance. Twelve months in advance they pay for the services and all the vet does is go in and do the services.
The first year, the first month, farmers signed up. Farmers paid, some for six months; they didn’t trust us enough to pay for a year, but they paid for six months. Some paid for a year. We had a good number join. But the following year, 2006, all those that had paid didn’t want to pay again. So we only had a few people want to buy that service.
But did we stop? No.
We kept on saying “This is the best solution for you. You need to buy this service. You need to keep your animals alive. You’re doing it all wrong. This is how you should do it.” Six months later we only had a few farmers again, most of the farmers had dropped out of the package.
And here we are: How do I go back and say “It’s not working.”?
How do I go and tell my supervisor, or go back to my quarterly report when I am writing to USAID saying “Oh, we are not getting the numbers, farmers are not buying our interventions.”?
It was hard. We didn’t want to do it. So we kept on pushing it. It meant – personally, on me – it meant I was not doing enough. You’re not going in the field enough. You’re not talking to farmers enough. You’re not having enough meetings.
I was also putting the pressure on the field staff because I was supervising a good number of field staff. I was putting the pressure on them: “You’re not going out enough. You’re not selling this thing. You’re not talking to service providers.” So another two years of pushing a service that farmers didn’t want to buy.
But we had a very good organization. They still kept telling us: “When you go out in the field, please come back to us and let us know what is not working so that we can work on that.”
But because admitting that it is not working means you are a failure, that you haven’t done a good job, no one wanted to do it. So we go out and still market it, come back, still market it, and come back. Until such a time that we really got problems from the supervisors: “Why are we not getting the numbers? You guys have been busy at this for two years and still only five vets are paying for services. The vets that paid last year do not want to pay for it. Why is this happening?”
But then we came to the problem, and this has to be done very well: You need to have very good people because it’s hard to tell them it’s not working, because they sign your paycheck. You’re thinking “If I say it’s not working and my contract is up for renewal, am I going to get the job?” So you’re in the middle of “Should I tell them ‘It’s not working’?” or “Should I pretend it’s working and it’s going to work if we push it more?”.
But with that lesson, with that problem from the supervisor, we reached a stage where we said “It’s not working. Guys, we have failed. The farmers are just not buying this. It’s not working for the service providers. It’s not working for the vets.”
And it’s only when we reached the stage when we were admitting that it was not working that we started to learn. Because all this time we were closed to learning about what wasn’t working, because we just thought “This is the best thing. This is it. No one has any other solution than this.”
Only when we sat down and we said “Guys, it’s not working. Let us re-look at this. Why are farmers not paying for this service? Why does a vet still not see this as a business? Why is it so hard for the farmer to come and pay for the service without us forcing him to do it?” That’s when we started to learn.
I want to say tonight: failure is painful to admit. And a lot of people that are in development work push an intervention just because they need to keep the numbers on and they don’t admit it in a report on the table. But sometimes, even though they know it’s not working, it’s a very difficult thing to admit.
When we sat down and re-looked at it, and we asked the question “Why is it not working?”, then we started to look at other ways in which this intervention could still be brought out to the farmers without it being a very difficult thing to buy.
The first thing we had to look at is: Why are they not paying for it? We forgot that these communities were not conventionally driven; they were trust driven. So their thought was: “If I pay a vet for a year, is he going to come out and vaccinate my cattle? My money is going to go, so I’ll lose out.”
They were not paying because they just didn’t trust to pay up front. And I would also not do it. I think we were asking too much from the farmers who have never met the vet, to pay him for a year – the vet who comes from 400 kilometers away – and pay him for a year so he’d come in and do the services.
When we admitted that this is not very good, we looked at it, and then we sat down to redesign it. When we looked at the why it was not working, we broke down that package into individual services and farmers buy as they want the service. So the farmer will buy the service that he needs at that particular time.
We just saw the way that it shifted: farmers started to buy it, and now we’re talking about thousands of dollars in sales to vet firms or vet service providers. That wouldn’t have happened three years ago.
So what I would like to say tonight is: A lot of donor-driven organizations, we have to answer to our donors, of course. Money is coming from somewhere. We’re evaluated based on the numbers: “What have you done with the 17 million dollars that have been given to us?”
But also, this is a lesson to people that are implementing projects. They need to build in their organization a culture of learning. A culture to allow their staff to admit that “No, this is not working.”
We need to get a conducive environment. Our supervisor – he was from somewhere else – but he made that environment a viable one for us. He said: “You guys, if it’s not working, come back and tell us it’s not working.” We just didn’t want to do it because we thought “Oh, this is going to take my job away.” But there was an incentive for us to come back and say: “It’s not working.”
And this is the lesson that a developmental organization needs to put in. They need to create their environment. They need to let their staff know that it’s OK to fail. It’s OK to say “This thing is not something that will work for this community” so that those staff come back and they tell them the truth and they’re able to change that in the intervention.
And now – between that same period, 2005 to 2010, we can safely stand up and say “the farmers were able to buy the vet services from the vets without any of us going out and pushing them because now it’s working for them and vets are also able to do business with the farmers without feeling “Oh we are being pushed to push the service to the farmer”.
At the end of this I want to say failure is not the end. The worst thing is – you as an implementing organization – you fail and you do nothing about it.
[Instead] You fail and ask why. When you answer the why question – why is it not working? – and look at other reasons and ways in which it would work, get up and do it because if you fail and say “it didn’t work so I’m just not going to try anything else” it won’t help anyone. That is the lesson I would like to let people know.
Maybe some people have not been to Zambia or Africa. It looks so easy but if you are working there you know that I need to keep this job. It’s an environment that is very difficult to work in and say “I am not doing a good job.”
Thank you.
Ka-Hay Law (Engineers Without Borders Canada):
Sorry, I’ve had the opportunity to work with Charity for three and a half years in Zambia and her voice needs to be heard more. Her voice needs to be heard more, and more of her voices and her peer’s voices need to be heard more. But something is stopping it and we need to do something about it.
When I was still new in Kenya, I was at a meeting about energy efficient stoves, reducing firewood consumption by around 50%. I had read about solar cookers that totally eliminate the need for firewood, so after some time I could not contain myself anymore, but remarked that it seemed unnecessary to still be using 50% firewood, when that could be reduced to zero.
“You must be very new to Kenya”, I was told, and indeed over the following months I realized that very rarely will the societies of Kenya or Eastern Africa in general accept to cook food in the open, for everyone to see, and with no fire. Indeed, one time while camping, we were physically threatened for cooking our food in the open – it is a strong taboo for several tribes, and with good reason – in areas and times of near starvation, showing others that you have food is not good manners.
Learning
People will however accept an efficient stove that reduces the consumption by half. Over the years since, I have seen many failed solar cooker projects and have often reminded myself of my own ignorance about this.
Around 2002, I donated a $700 Katadyn water filter to an orphanage in Haiti. I instructed them on the use of the filter, and asked them to be sure and filter water for the neighbours of the orphanage too… to build up good relationships with their community. They seemed amazed that such a small piece of equipment (around 10 pounds) would actually work to create clean water, but after I drank water purified by the unit, they were convinced.
The filter was rated for 20,000 gallons, so I told them whenever they used it up, to let me know and I would send them another cartridge. I thought we were golden when I left.
Because the filter was so expensive, after I left, it got put into a locked closet. It was rarely taken out and used. I don’t believe it was ever used for the neighbors and rarely for the orphans.
Eventually, someone broke into the closet, or an employee with a key, not sure which, stole the water filter and sold it. The money did not, to my understanding, go to serve the orphans in any way. I have always hoped that someone was getting clean water from it, but who knows?
Learning
What did I learn? Portable isn’t always good. High tech isn’t always good. Be aware that not all people are honest. Poverty is a bitch. Solving problems isn’t easy.
If you’ve followed charity: water over the last five years, you have probably heard us say, Tweet or write: $20 can provide clean and safe drinking water to one person for 20 years. But earlier this year, we removed the “20 years” part from that messaging.
As with any retraction, this sparked a discussion with our staff about how we deal with failure. We didn’t necessarily “fail” in providing water for 20 years to the people we serve—not only are we not there yet, but we’re also adamant that we do what it takes to make sure each of our water projects last at least that long.
However, we knew that if we continued to promise that each $20 donation would provide one person access to water for two decades, we’d be using a number we’re not certain about. In effect, we’d be failing the faith of the public and our mission to “reinvent charity”—to restore peoples’ trust in charitable work. And that’s been an ambition of ours from the start.
So as we changed the messaging about 20 years across our site, we immediately took to our blog with an explanation, hoping to spark a dialogue around the word “sustainability” and divulge what goes into the numbers we use to explain our work.
Here’s the breakdown:
where’d charity: water get $20?
It comes down to simple math: $20 is the average cost per person to implement a charity: water project. That includes funds for sanitation, hygiene training and our partners’ existing maintenance models.
The technologies we fund depend on the region, the local culture and the program of our local implementing partner. Construction in some places can be relatively cheap; in others, even getting out to the project site in the first place costs a fortune. Here’s the breakdown of the average costs per country we work in, to give you an idea of just how much the cost of building a project can vary from program to program:
where’d you get 20 years?
Four years ago, the accepted average lifespan of many of our water technologies was 20 years. Since then, charity: water—and the water sector as a whole—has been reevaluating what “sustainability” really means. We’ve always known that $20 per person covers the implementation of the water project on the ground. But we became unclear about the cost to maintain our water projects over time; so we didn’t want to continue to tell our supporters or the general public that $20 can cover the cost of water for one person for 20 years.
A $20 donation to charity: water can still provide one person with the initial access to safe water, since it pays for construction of the project and early engagement with the community it serves. But keeping the project running over the next 20 years could cost more—we aren’t sure yet. This will depend on the technology, which maintenance model works best and how (and when) the community fully takes ownership of their water project.
how will charity: water projects last?
For each charity: water project we fund, from drilled wells to household BioSand filters, we work with our local partner to include some type of maintenance component. Just like the cost of building projects, this also varies; in some countries, we form and support local Water Committees to look after the projects. In others, we fund training for individual families to learn how to maintain their projects or set up a scheme where the village pays an available repair team to help.
We’re also dedicated to innovation in water project sustainability. The water sector as a whole is shifting its focus from the number of projects built to the longevity of these water sources. It’s an exciting time; new opportunities that have come up in just the last few years have potential to drastically increase accountability for water projects and monitor their sustainability.
We’re already piloting or supporting new systems to oversee our projects in the field. Here are a few examples:
Public-Private Partnerships in India
We’ve supported the establishment of Public-Private Partnership (PPP) Centers in two urban districts of India, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The program trains local youth and women to repair and maintain hand pumps. This provides jobs, ensures a repair option for locals and best of all—the center is a business, so it sustains itself. The PPP centers serve as demonstration sites, whose best practices can then be replicated by local government, with our partners indirect involvement and support.
One of our implementing partners, Water For People, has created an innovative visual data system to make monitoring projects more transparent and reliable. They upload data—GPS coordinates, populations served, state of the water project—from the field on mobile devices (usually smart phones). This data is then available online for anyone to assess the status of projects. Since we already prove every charity: water project using GPS and photos, we’re hoping FLOW helps us get more information on our projects and get it faster, too.
Clustering in rural Ethiopia
Monitoring projects in remote areas is very challenging. Our local partners in Ethiopia have adapted by “clustering” many of their charity: water projects to concentrated areas. This makes gathering data easier, as it’s all in one place. It also fosters region-wide accountability; communities learn best practices from others who are taking care of their projects.
Learning
so what are the new numbers?
We don’t have them yet—and because we’re starting to invest in a diverse portfolio of water technologies and sanitation models, we actually may never again have a nicely-rounded number to put on every project we fund. We’ll still use averages to give people an idea of how much our projects cost. But we also plan to do more than that as we scale our work—we’re going to share the costs of our water programs along the way, through stories and proof of completed projects in the field.
Earlier this summer, we launched a new feature on our online fundraising platform, mycharitywater.org, where we tie every dollar donated to the water project it funded in the field. Donors and fundraisers can learn just how much went into each component of a water project along with where it was built and who is using it. We call this Dollars to Projects—we see it as a powerful way to share the costs of our work while connecting donors to the people they’re helping in developing countries.
on failure
charity: water has always tried to be up-front with our supporters about our work. And we’ve found that the more and the sooner we admit “failure,” the more we gain trust with our donors, the more we build credibility with the public and the more we feel empowered to share the hard parts of our work.
In a way, showing the public where we’ve messed up or why we want to suddenly move in a new direction is like taking a deep sigh of relief. We’ve given ourselves the chance to share the hard stuff. We’re sparking important conversations and welcoming scrutiny because we really have nothing to hide. And our supporters become closer to use as let them in on how we’ve made our decisions.
When we ask people to join our mission—by fundraising, donating, volunteering or raising awareness—we invite them into understanding the trials and tribulations of our work, too. So far, we’ve been grateful to find that many are up for the challenge.
Six months into my placement I started working part-time with Machinga district, following up on work that several of my colleagues had started there. They had been assisting the district with conducting a survey of rural water infrastructure. The purpose of the survey was to help identify areas of high and low service, in order to improve planning for new infrastructure, and identify non-functional infrastructure so it could be repaired.
We were proposing a new approach to updating rural water supply data, using an existing network of health department extension workers embedded in rural areas. We were very optimistic that the survey updates could be managed sustainably by the district without on-going external support. Following the initial survey, I was responsible for helping the district conduct quarterly updates.
The district had been given substantial funding from one of our NGO partners to do an initial survey and was not excited about the idea of doing an update with their own limited operational budget. When we began discussing an information update, they immediately requested that I negotiate additional funding from our NGO partner.
At this point, I should have stepped back and assessed what really would have been necessary for sustainability. The funding from the NGO partner would not be available forever and eventually funding would have to be provided from the district budget. I should have had this discussion with the district, and determined what, if anything, would motivate them to take ownership over the data collection process, and fund it themselves.
Instead I defined success as a “successful update of the survey”, and prioritized the one-off activity over the long-term outcome of sustainability. In order to sustain the district’s involvement with the system, I negotiated for our NGO partner to release a small amount of funding for them, less than $200, which they eventually did – leading directly to a successful update of the survey.
It was time for another round of data collection three months later, however, this time no NGO funding was available. My colleagues at the district were not happy when I told them this yet, despite their reservations, they agreed to try to fund data collection on their own. A half-hearted attempt at data collection emerged, with a less than 50% complete return. Three months later, when it came time for another update, they chose not to do data collection at all. The water infrastructure monitoring system in Machinga had, in effect, been proven unsustainable.
Learning
Upon reflection, I can think of two major failures from this story:
Prioritizing tangible activities as outcomes. Success is hard to find sometimes in development work and can have a serious effect on how we think about it. For me, success quickly became about having the district staff collect data –it was tangible, concrete, and simple. Success wasn’t about the district office valuing the program or about behavior change. This all but guaranteed that my own priorities and the actual priorities of the district would eventually become misaligned
Using distorting financial incentives to achieve an outcome. This is a classic pitfall in development, and one that I walked right into. Once I had an outcome in mind – data collection – it became easy to organize the NGO funding needed to make it happen. But using financial means to achieve my outcome (almost bribery in a way) quickly eroded the foundation of actual relevance that would be necessary for long-term sustainability of our program.
Since the experience in Machinga, I’ve been taking an almost opposite approach. These days, when we work with districts, we bring no external funding, even for the initial surveys. If districts want to work with us to help improve their planning and information management, they are responsible for first funding a full round of data collection without any assistance from us or our NGO partner. This serves as almost a priori proof that the work we’re doing together is: (a) actually relevant to the district (or else why would they fund it?), (b) actually financially sustainable. This has led to district governments being much more invested in the work we’re doing together, and is sowing the seeds for sustainability much better than our old approach.
