FAILURE. FAILURE! FAIIILLLURE!!!! Okay, I just had to get that out of the way…
Working in the water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) sector, failure is a reality that must be faced. In all areas of life, understanding and learning from failure is integral to achieving the equally memorable moments of success. Yet where are all the publications talking about failure? Why does every NGO seem to be single-handedly revolutionizing the historically problematic development field, taking a new approach that actually works?!
In academia and in the workplace we are compelled to highlight our successes in order to build-up our reputations and to encourage others to put faith in us. Feeling successful inspires us to be more ambitious, more open to reaching out to others and more motivated to continue with our work. While it is classic wisdom to learn from our mistakes, in the development sector (and others) this is easier said than done. Most projects rely on soliciting funding from donors who must have confidence that their contributions will lead to discernable change. In academia we often rely on external funding that is awarded to those who
demonstrate evidence of past successes with the assumption that these individuals and groups are the most likely to succeed again in the future. We avoid taking risks because we are afraid to fail.
While it is fair to celebrate success, the ‘fail forward’ movement is gaining momentum as people come to accept the notion that “the only ‘bad’ failure is one that’s repeated” (admittingfailure.com). If we keep quiet about our failures, not only do we miss the chance to study and learn from them ourselves, but also we miss the opportunity to learn from others’. As a somewhat unabashed person myself, I find that most times I publicly share a story of failure it seems to foster an unassuming space where others then feel comfortable sharing their mistakes and challenges. Too often I find that more than one of us has had similar experiences that could have been avoided with proper communication about them from the beginning. As Albert Einstein said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.”
One challenge in the water and WASH sectors is this word sustainability. While the concept is written into thousands of legal statutes, masters’ theses, and Twitter feeds worldwide, there is not one single consensus definition. It insinuates that something can be maintained or upheld for a certain period of time, yet I ask who is it that determines how long something must be ‘sustained’ in order to be truly ‘sustainable’? In the context of sustainable development, the word implies three pillars of longevity: environmental, social, and economical (sometimes a forth– cultural vitality). Yet how can we complete a two-year project and claim it is going to be sustainable? In the WASH arena, it seems that it is not uncommon to see a project mention a brief follow-up study or site-visit tacked onto the end of an implementation project as a means to ‘tick the sustainability box’. So does this mean that if a project appears to be functioning on the day that the inspector goes to look at it somewhere between six-months and two years after completion, that the project is a sustainability success? What about in the rainy season? What about five years after? Or fifty? Let’s call a spade a spade and recognize that it’s impossible to claim a project is sustainable when we are operating at most on a five-year project funding timeline and usually from across the globe.

Common answers point to internal problems in the aid-receiving country (corruption, instability, resistance to change) yet rarely do we consider the implications of rapid rate project-cycling and the restrictions imposed by donors (Moriarity, 2015). As radical as it sounds, it appears that FAILURE might have something to do with OUR APPROACH. Short-funding cycles trap even the best-intentioned individuals and organizations into repeating the same failures over and over again. No brilliantly designed toilet alone can overcome the systemic problem of get-in-get-out WASH projects. As Improve International says, ‘Let’s measure success not by dollars spent on projects but on how many people have water and sanitation services over time.’

We are so quick to install as many wells as possible that we do not take the time to connect with the community, to ask their needs and to invite them to take ownership of the project to ensure that it is preserved for a lifetime. We do not invest in training or financial empowerment initiatives that might help communities to be prepared to solve their own needs in the future. Why give a man a fish when you can instead teach him how to catch his own? In a short funding cycle it is easier to demonstrate how many fish he has eaten since you showed up than it is to express that he’s still learning to be a better fisherman and continues to go hungry some nights in the process.
While I have no doubt that infrastructure-donation organizations are well intentioned, I do wonder why each of us thinks that we are going to be able to do it so much better than the one who came before us. What do we expect to happen if world charity ceases to continue, or do we not want to plan for that day?

We are in that failure trap. We are ashamed of mistakes, we hide them (or shroud them in excuses that are outside of our control), and we repeat them. We embrace risk-aversion techniques and get stuck in status quo solutions that make it easy to ‘succeed.’ Money spent – check. Progress measured (in number of taps and people served)—check. Start applying for the next grant—check.
WatIF we were not afraid to fail? Would we engage in the underexplored and uncertain process of initiating transformative shifts in the way that the system functions? WatIF we worked to educate a generation so that they demand WASH facilities from their governments and societies, instead of coming in from the outside and insisting that people need what we want to give? WatIF we took the risk to promote business-skills training for aspiring water engineers, knowing that some will not go onto to serve their communities but that others might go on to do extraordinary things? WatIF we dared to make aid-assisted WASH development obsolete, by risking to improving billions of lives in a slow and messy way instead of settling on improving thousands of lives in a way that is quick and temporary?
When we are driven by purpose—not competition—we can embrace inter-personal and inter-organizational learning to better advancing our shared goals. When we stop treating failure as the elephant in the room we can foster innovation to discover paths to the systemic changes needed to overcome the statues quo. WatIF?
Sources of Inspiration and Information:
1. Engineers Without Borders. (2016). Admitting Failure. Retrieved February 01, 2016, from https://www.admittingfailure.org/
2. Improve International. (2015, December 12). Do donor restrictions affect sustainability of water and sanitation interventions? Results from a Pilot Survey. Retrieved from https://improveinternational.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/pilot-study-donor-restrictions-wash-sustainability-12-21-15.pdf
3. Moriarity, P. (2015, October 15). Paying the Piper- 3 Things Donors Can Do To Drive Real Change. Retrieved February 6, 2016, from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/patrick-moriarty/paying-the-piper-3-things-donors-can-do-to-drive-real-change_b_8303668.html
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