Wednesday, April 06, 2011

NGO hopes to benefit from failure | Madeleine Bunting | Global development | guardian.co.uk

NGO hopes to benefit from failure | Madeleine Bunting | Global development | guardian.co.uk: "So I'm full of admiration for a Canadian NGO that is breaking all the rules by publishing a failure report. Engineers Without Borders has bravely catalogued various mistakes in its projects. Project officers come clean in a series of snapshots of what they did wrong . So Owen Scott confesses that he thought he knew exactly what was needed in Malawi, where he was working on a water project. He secured the funding and got it sorted: an updated survey. But it only postponed the problem, which was that the district government didn't have the money to regularly update the survey. Scott admitted 'prioritising tangible activities' and effectively using money as bribery."

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