02 | WTF (WHAT THE FAILURE)
🤷♀️ Hey hey it’s the second WTF (what the failure!) Wednesday where I share different examples of failure in international development, aid, and poverty alleviation writ large.
👉 The point is not to point fingers, but to resurface learnings so we don’t all make the same mistakes.
🎁😢 I just got invited to a White Elephant party, a theme party where you give people things they don’t want or need (and usually they are cheap). In honor of that theme, I bring you an oldy but goody (and unfortunately still relevant-y): Watering White Elephants by Ole Therkildsen.
In the 1980s, while doing some research on water and health, he noticed two things:
“The donor-funded plans were not much used and the water supply improvements tended not to be sustainable despite relatively large donor inputs of money, material and manpower. It was and is customary to blame this on the rapidly deteriorating economic conditions in Tanzania and on in- appropriate domestic policies. These were – and are – certainly valid reasons.
But I also became increasingly convinced that the donor approaches to planning and implementation contributed significantly to the problems of the non-use of plans and the non-sustainability of schemes. In fact, the donor support to water supply improvements in Tanzania appeared to illustrate the crises of donor funded rural development activities in many African countries very well.”
He concludes: “The dilemma that must be confronted in such attempts is this: a faster immediate improvement of the rural water supply situation result if donors continue to use the control-oriented approach to planning and implementation. But the village level improvements resulting from this approach are not sustainable in the long run.
🪣 Much slower improvements might result at village level if the adaptive approach were used by donors. But these improvements may perhaps be more sustainable in the long run because they are also the result of local commitments and capacity to plan and implement. The challenge for Tanzania is to find the trade-off between buckets full of aid money and buckets full of water!”
👂Sound familiar?
Read more https://lnkd.in/dYAT6RSM
