DEVELOPMENT REPORT - Why Development Projects Fail

       Last week, we told you about fallfaire, an event where pepople talked about international development projects that failed.

       Many of these projects started as good ideas. Others have some level of sucess. But not enough to have measurable effects on lives of people in developing countries.

       An nonprofit organization in New York called mobileactive held the first fallfaire earlier this year. Mobileactive is made up of  people of organizations that used tecnology to try to improve the lives of the poor.

       Katrin Verclas came up with the idea for fallfaire as a way to help nonprofit groups improve by learning from mistakes of others.

        The primary goal is to learn from failure, and not to repeat the same mistake over and over again. And for a community of practitioners to benefit from lessons learned of other people. We can do better at the next time around. Collectively as a field, individually as an organization or practitioners .

        Katrin Verclas says there are many reasons why projects faile. But one reason tops all others. She says development projects are not "one size fits all". Yet many people try to import their ideas as if they were.

        What they failed to consider is the desire of local people or their cultural, economic and potilical differences. She says the problem for nongovermental organizations and other groups is simply not knowing their audiences.

        Western organizations, or NGOs, donors in particular have particular ideas in what may be alleviating some particular problem in developing countries. Without a really good understanding of the end users or the beneficiaries.

        The creator of fallfaire says this is true no only with tecnology, but other projects as well. Ms clark hopes nonprofits in other industries and field will creat their own version of failfaire. A second failfaire took place in July in Washton.

The world bank institut co-sponsored the event. To Katrin Verclas, it was a good sign to have the world bank support such open disscussions about failure.

       "We have a lot riding on this, after all,it is not just products, it is people's lives, well-being and livelihoods in many developing countries what we talk about. It is cumbent upon us to be very very honest about what projects are not performing according to expectations.

          And award for the best worst failure stories went to         , What he presented was in fact a list , it was a list of what he considers the worst practices in the use of information or communications technology in education.

        Mr ** gets to keep the award until the next failfaire, which is expected to be held on westcoast in fall.