Learning from failure

Last week I travelled to Jakarta and West Kalimantan in Indonesia for some leadership meetings and to visit a number of remote education projects.  It's always good to spend time visiting projects in another region, particularly to hear from communities and staff about successes, failures and various programming models.  The communities we visited were located in Northwest Kalimantan, and are implementing an education approach in several of their schools called AJEL (Active, Joyful, Effective Learning).  AJEL has been jointly developed with UNICEF and is being piloted in a number of schools across Indonesia.  Central to the AJEL concept is a high level of community engagement and ownership in the education process, as well as a strong investment in teacher training.  Many of these communities historically have had very low levels of education attainment, with many children leaving school at a very young age to end up as workers in palm oil plantations or illegal mining operations.  Both these industries have had disastrous environmental impacts in Kalimantan, so the development of alternative economic opportunities is necessary to try and break the current cycle.  Increased education attainment levels for children is key to facilitating these alternative opportunities.  

The AJEL concept has been very successful thus far, although evaluation on longer term results can only be assessed once the projects have been running for several more years. This model and approach to education in rural poor communities has application in other parts of the developing world, so we all benefitted from the field visit.  Assessing impacts, success and failure in development projects is a contentious area, as impacts (positive or negative) in these projects are often highly qualitative.  What is clear though, is that whilst many development projects have significant and lasting positive impacts for communities, there are others that fail in the longer term due a range of internal or external factors.  

Effective and comprehensive community engagement and ownership from the outset of a project is a key success factor consistently identified in project evaluations.  Seems obvious, but there are still countless projects in play around the world with Government and NGO implementers that fail to address this basic principle.  It is critical for implementing agencies to invest heavily in project evaluation, and to learn from success but even more so from failures.  I was challenged recently by the TED talk below, which profiles a case study of Engineers Without Borders, and their experience and perspective on project failures.  We need to understand that failure is not a dirty word, but rather is an intrinsic aspect of longer term success and impact.  I think this also equally applies for the corporate and non-profit sector.  The talk is about 13 minutes long, but worth watching if you have the time.

In addition to project visits in West Kalimantan, we also visited an urban development project in the slums around the harbour in Jakarta.  People in the area make their money collecting and processing garbage from the mounds of refuse that surround the harbour.  Pretty confronting stuff, but it was remarkable to visit a community centre in the midst of this poverty where children meet, learn drama and music, study, play games and also develop and lead a range of projects to improve the wellbeing of children in the area.  I am always humbled and challenged to visit these types of communities, and I often think of Jesus' words in the sermon on the mount, and that he was speaking to children and communities such as this.


"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven".


Happy Easter.