Why Development Projects Fail: One Size Does Not Fit All

20 September 2010

Members of the charity Oxfam demonstrate outside a meeting of European Union finance ministers in Brussels earlier this month. "Bankers," left, and "nongovernmental organizations," right, fight over a giant euro note.

This is the VOA Special English Development Report.

Last week we told you about FAILFaire, an event where people talk about international development projects that failed.

Many of these projects started as good ideas. Others had some level of success, but not enough to have a measurable effect on the lives of people in developing countries.

A nonprofit group in New York called MobileActive held the first FAILFaire earlier this year. MobileActive is made up of people and organizations that use technology to try to improve the lives of the poor.

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

Katrin Verclas: "The primary goal is to learn from failure and not to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. And for a community of practitioners to benefit from the lessons learned from other people so that we can do better the next time around, collectively as a field, and individually as organizations and practitioners."

Katrin Verclas says there are many reasons why projects fail, but one reason tops all others. She says development projects are not "one size fits all," yet many people try to import ideas as if they were.