Failure is the f-word in international development. Unspoken in polite company, yet a reality we all must face.
Failure in International Development
We often work in failed states, in market failure economies, on intractable problems that have stymied others for decades, if not centuries. How arrogant or foolish of us to expect success 100% of the time?
But if you read our project reports, we have “uneven successes”, “lessons learned”, and every other euphemism we can imagine just to keep from saying one simple word: failure.
Project Failure Examples
We are on a mission to make failure acceptable in development discussions. There is great value in examining our mistakes and learning from failure as we go beyond the easy and the simple.
Let’s navel-gaze at where we have all gone wrong in international development:
Open Standards Can Change Everything
February’s San Francisco Technology Salon centered around current technology challenges in the developing world. What are our current needs? What’s holding...
Learning From My 11 Failed Technology Projects
It’s always great to look at one’s current or past successes, but what about the failures? Every entrepreneur (hell, every person person) has failed at something…...
Failure is the F-Word in International Development
On Friday night, I organized the third annual Fail Faire DC to celebrate failure as a mark of innovation and risk-taking. Check out the photos and Twitter stream...
You Are Invited to Fail Faire DC 2012
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Fail Faire DC 2012 is a celebration of failure as a mark of innovation and risk-taking. Like our event in...
This is the single biggest success (or failure) factor in ICT4E
I am Jonathan Nalder and I want to remind you of a concept made famous by early Star Trek episodes where any character wearing a ‘red shirt’ was...
9 Lessons to Learn from Fail Faire UK 2012
We had an amazing sharing of failure at Fail Faire UK 2012, and amidst the laughter at how wrong we can be in deploying information and communication technologies...
Join us for Fail Faire UK 2012 – a celebration of failure
Projects succeed, projects fail. The successes are always reported on, the failures are often filed away – pushed under the proverbial rug. Well, its time...
A Cautionary Tale of ICT4D Failure at Scale
Back in 2009, a few MIT students started “Fab Labs” in Afghanistan to teach Afghans how to fabricate small-scale projects, one of which was wireless...
Celebrating Failure with a FailFaire at ICTD2012
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I am Mustafa Naseem and I am attending ICTD 2012, the premier conference for the field of Information and Communication Technology for Development. ICTD opened...
A Ugandan mHealth Moratorium Is a Good Thing
I am David McCann and when I first arrived in Uganda, I used to describe it as “the perfect storm” for aid in general, and M4D in particular. The country...
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