If you spend any time with international non-governmental organizations — if you observe their social media presences or talk to their spokespeople — you may get the sense that the industry is universally successful. That every project accomplishes its goals, that donor money is always spent wisely, that every NGO worker has tremendously improved the lives of needy people around the world.
But for all of the sector’s eagerness to share their success stories, there is a taboo F-word: failure. This is not by accident. Not only does failure hurt, admitting to it can have serious ramifications for NGOs because much of their funding depends on success.
Just as in our personal lives, talking about failures and shortcomings requires not only brutal honesty but also humility. However, the NGO world does not reward humility. As Ian Smillie, foreign aid critic and author, points out: “Development enterprise is notoriously risk averse; donors demand [positive] results and punish failure.”
While “failing up” and “failing better” are becoming fashionable in other sectors, the NGO industry has been slow to acknowledge its mistakes. The good news is that things are slowly changing. Engineers Without Borders publishes a failure report, and even set up the website AdmittingFailure to encourage other NGOs to share their stories of failure and help the industry become more transparent.
BRAC, a global NGO headquartered in Dhaka, Bangladesh that assists marginalized people through education, healthcare, microfinance, and humanitarian aid projects, is joining this movement. It recently published its second annual Failure Report.
BRIGHT Magazine spoke to BRAC’s Rakib Avi, Masrura Oishi, Shafqat Aurin, Zaian Chowdhury, and Matt Kertman about why they started publishing the report and what the organization has learned from its failed projects. Here is our conversation, which has been edited for readability.
BRIGHT: This is the second failure report that your organization has published. What was the genesis of it? Why do a failure report in the first place?
BRAC: We are a learning organization first and foremost, so experimenting has been part of our operations for over 40 years. Our organization has a learning-oriented culture, not just analyzing success but talking about failures as well. But that usually stays within the different departments and people who are running projects.
In 2017, we started thinking of how we can give this process a more external look. We wanted to get from the point of talking about failures [internally] to being open about it, and we also wanted the rest of the organization to reflect about things that didn’t work and how they can be made better. That led us to develop the report.
BRIGHT: Can you give me an example of a project that failed and what you learned from that experience?
BRAC: Back in the 1970s and ’80s, diarrheal diseases were one of the major killers of children under 5 in Bangladesh. Scientists in the 1960s had discovered an oral rehydration solution that would help children. BRAC identified a community-centered method for mixing the solution that used local measurements (a fistful of raw sugar plus a three-finger pinch of salt with half a liter of boiled water) and could be taught to families without formal education. So we sent our healthcare workers door to door to talk to mothers and teach them how to mix the solution.
What we found out after a few months was that only 10 percent of the mothers were actually giving it to their children who were suffering from diarrhea. And we started asking what was happening, what went wrong? We found out that the fathers in those households were blocking the mothers from using this mysterious solution brought to them by NGO workers — and that resulted in the solution not reaching the children in need.
From that moment, whenever we went into any village we gathered all the male members of the household and gave them the same message. We made them part of the process.
I think that without having a strong sense of humility, it’s difficult to make corrections. At BRAC, we believe it’s important to co-create solutions with communities and not just export things from somewhere else.
BRIGHT: Let’s talk a little bit about humility, because it does take humility to admit failure and to say it publicly.
BRAC: I think what defines our approach is humility in the sense that we’ve always listened and been responsive. It’s one of the biggest defining factors in our leadership style. Our leaders have always been very open to talk about their failures. Even our chairperson has openly admitted that he has failed many times.
To this day, if you meet the field staff who are at the heart of our operations, it’s in-built in their work ethics to constantly engage with people that we serve and to be quick to address emerging needs. We’ve always believed that people who experience the problem are actually the ones that are best capable of solving it.
Also, our Social Innovation Lab does an internal forum every month within the head office that creates space for conversation for our colleagues. We either feature an external or internal innovation, or something that’s worth debating. We held a forum on failure, during which our chairperson, Fazle Hasan Abed, talked about his own failures. He encouraged more risk-taking. His point was that you will fail, but what happens after that is what matters.
BRIGHT: You spoke about things like being a good listener, being responsive, and being able to course correct. These are not qualities we often associate with large international NGOs. Why does the development industry often seem to resist responsiveness and self-analysis?
BRAC: We can only speak for ourselves and not the overall development sector, but what we can say is that self-analysis is something BRAC has definitely benefited from.
Sometimes we see organizations not being able to articulate well enough their vision towards solving a problem. Solving a problem is very important, but the process is equally important. If the process is not anchored towards the community, if it’s not anchored towards actual real insights from the people themselves, then you are opening yourself up to a bigger risk of failing in a way that post-correction would be so much more expensive.
We also host an annual gathering, called the Frugal Innovation Forum, to focus on innovations in our sector with the best developmental minds in the global south. We gather to talk about the best and most frugal ways of doing development work. That is something that we would want to help others through our report.
BRIGHT: How do you define failure?
BRAC: We look at failure as a part of continuous improvement. As part of correcting, taking lessons, and applying them. How we approach each of these cases is to get what might have gone wrong and what might be the lessons going forward. That’s what we are trying to capture in our report. We see it as knowledge dissemination.
The other side of that is leading by example and having the courage to share our failures publicly as a large international NGO. It’s pretty rare. We think part of the reason why we are comfortable doing that is because we are a global south organization. We were born and raised in the communities we work with which gives us humility. We think it’s about practicing what we preach.
