Transcriber: Denise RQ Reviewer: Alessandra Tadiotto
Meet Inook. He is a pretty happy guy.
And I'd be pretty happy too if this was the first time
that my community had just gained access to fresh water.
Inook is from the country of Malawi,
the small sliver of a country in Southern Africa,
known as the warm heart of Africa.
Over the past 10 years, five million more people like Inook in Malawi
have gained access to fresh water.
But what's unfortunate is that this picture is a lie.
I'll come back to that in a second.
10 years ago, two Waterloo engineers sparked a movement across Canada,
"Engineers without borders."
This movement was based on the concept that it was completely unacceptable
that 5 million people in Malawi did not have access to fresh water,
when us, engineers back in Canada were working on problems
such as making a photocopier increase its speed
from 149 pages a minute to 151 pages per minute.
We needed to work on problems that mattered.
I was fortunated, I found the Calgary chapter here,
I got to be the first director of overseas programs for EWB in Africa,
where I worked for 4 years,
and I got to work with hundreds of businesses, non government organizations,
governments, all working in this field of development.
It was really fantastic working for EWB
because even though we worked on hundred-million-dollar projects
we had this philosophy
that if we were really going to understand the problems in local Africa,
we needed to live like local Africans.
As a lot of ex-patriots would spend most of the time
in the capital cities and boardrooms,
we'd spend our time in villages
learning local languages, traveling on public transports.
And what this allowed us to do was to get a really deep understanding
of what was going on at the field level,
And combined with this experience — and hundreds of other EWB experiences —
we got a really interesting perspective of what's going on in this aid industry.
The aid industry has got a lot of attention lately,
economists have become authors and have written about it
and there's a lot of controversy about its effectiveness,
some even asking the question, "Has aid failed?"
It's a very interesting question.
Now, I am confident to say on behalf of EWB staff members
that failed or not, we definitely feel that the aid system is broken.
And when I say broken it's not what the media usually talks about.
It's not about corrupt dictators or about corruption,
— those issues still happen in Africa
but they are much more the minority than they are the mainstream today.
I am talking about aid being broken in democratic elected, stable governments
with no civil unrest, countries like Ghana, Malawi, and Zambia.
So I'll talk about Malawi.
The World Bank has stated that 80% of the people in Malawi
have access to fresh water sources.
So one of our staff members in Malawi, this is Owen,
was visiting one of those water points.
It was a gravity-fed system
that was commissioned by the Canadian government
and finished about a year and a half ago.
A gravity fed system is basically a bunch of pipes
that pipe water down from an elevated region,
into a number of communities
where there are taps and people can access that water.
He was going around turning on those taps and some of them weren't working,
so he asked the community,
"How many of these are working?" and they said, "Out of a 113, 81."
81? What's the problem? What's going on?
He found out that a lot of the pipes had sprung leaks and had broken down.
All right, not a big deal, pipes break down everywhere.
But the problem with this project was that even though the infrastructure was built
there was no thinking about who is going to maintain this system.
And some people took initiative and tried to fix the pipes themselves
but there was a lack of affordable spare parts available.
This situation is typical.
This is a graphic showing one area of Malawi, I think it's an urban area,
where the green dots are functional water points,
yellow are the ones that are working but breaking down,
and red are not functional.
Hardly 80% and actually, EWB has done some work and found out
that even out of those 80% coverage of water points, 40% are not working.
See, this issue is a lot of donors and projects
end up on focusing on the hardware side of the issue
and not really realizing the importance of the software side of things.
At first it's like ' "Wow, software!" of course you have to do maintenance,
but when you think about people donating into charities,
it makes you feel a lot better if you know that your money went
to something tangible, something like a well, a school,
something like giving a family a goat.
It's not as sexy and easy to tell your friends about
how you helped fund a water committee or paid for teacher salaries.
So when I say that this picture of Inook is a lie,
it's not a lie when the picture is taken
it only becomes a lie, a year or two afterwards.
When looking at this picture one of my great colleagues said,
"Everything people see from Africa doesn't matter.
And everything that matters from Africa, people don't get to see."
And this problem goes a lot further that just broken down water points.
Owen, after seeing this water point, discovered not more than 30 feet away:
"Hey there's another set of taps that look really broken down too
but they are not attached to the system."
And he asked the community, "What of that? What's that?"
They said: "Oh, that's the American government gravity-fed water system."
It was built over ten years ago.
He said, "What happened to that?"
"Oh, it also broke down about a year and a half later."
How is it that a project that failed ten years ago
was rebuilt [with] almost the same technology and process
and had exactly the same failures ten years later?
I recently joined a startup company that sells goods online,
that uses a lot of Africa fair trade goods sort of the ethical Ebay or Amazon.
And what we've learned, as being a private sector startup
is that if we don't serve our customers
and we don't provide them the product that they need, they won't buy it.
And if we don't innovate, change and adapt to their needs, we go out of business.
So they have a power to hold us accountable.
If we look to the public sector,
it doesn't adapt and change quite as fast as the private sector, but, in the end,
if the elected government doesn't meet the needs of its constituency,
they have a chance to vote them out of power,
therefore holding them accountable.
But in the development sector,
if they don't serve the needs of their beneficiaries
— and aren't only NGO's, they're governments and businesses as well —
the beneficiaries have no power to vote them out or to fire them.
The people who have that power are the donors.
And when you look at the system, you start to see some of the challenges.
Development is the sector that focuses more on pleasing the donors,
and making them happy, and communicating to them,
as opposed to understanding the needs of the beneficiaries.
Because of that systematic challenge is very slow to innovate,
there's very little change, and you get exactly the same project
built ten years later that fails in exactly the same way.
So what we do about this?
First answer is easy, we invest
in the private and the public sectors in the developing world.
They are inheritedly structurally built to be more sustainable
and to allow beneficiaries to hold them accountable.
However, 70% of people in sub-Saharian Africa
still make less than 2 dollars a day, they are still in poverty.
And the reason is
because the private and the public sector are not serving them appropriately.
So we do need to invest in businesses and in governments in Africa,
but it's still going to take a long time for the problems to be fixed.
Therefore it leaves us with the one option and we need to work with this system.
Therefore we have to fix it,
to make it more accountable, more creative, more transparent.
We need to start innovating, coming up with really neat ideas,
ideas like giving beneficiaries a chance to rate their project
using their mobile phones,
that donors and NGOs can understand.
Or moving our donors closer to our beneficiaries.
Currently, only 20% of the Canadian
international development agencies' African staff are based in Africa.
Ideas like funding development sectors, like VCs Fund businesses.
What would it be like
if a donor funded ten projects and expected four of them to do OK,
one of them to do fantastic, and five of them to fail?
And not all of the solutions need to be that complex.
EWB is working out on one that's actually quite simple,
it's admitting failure.
My first project with EWB was in India, where I worked with a bunch of schools.
Poor of the poorest of schools in India, with the untouchable cast.
This is Bani, she was a girl who was in one of those schools
and she and her classmates had to spend from two to three hours a day
walking and collecting water to bring it back to the school
so they could have fresh water to drink, and for cooking, and the bathroom.
My job as an EWB was to help solve the problem.
I worked with the communities and their rain water harvest solutions
were to collect water from the rooftops during the monsoons
bring it through gutters, filter and store it for the dry season.
After a number of months I left,
we had our project funded and was being implemented.
I returned back home to Canada almost a hero.
My friends and family were like, "Wow, it's fantastic!
You gave up your job in the oil and gas sector to volunteer in India,
that's really inspiring."
A year later I contacted my NGO
to see how everything was going with the rain water harvesting systems.
And they told me that not a single one was still operating.
The reason was a lot of them had been built,
but some of them had broken down
because there is no maintenance schedule plan in place.
I've made the exact same mistake that I criticized earlier.
When I thought about my friends and family back home who thought I was such a hero
I felt like an impostor.
I thought of Beni, I didn't helped her at all.
Admitting failure is actually quite hard and I didn't tell many people about this,
and one of the only things that helped me feel better about this
— and is a bit of shame to say this —
was that I started to learn that other people in EWB had failed too.
But EWB have this culture of embracing failure openly, letting us talk about it,
and was only through a bunch of us talking about failure that we really got to see
we are making a lot of mistakes and we got to see
we are making the same ones and we can learn from them.
And we started to innovate and to change.
EWB is drastically different now,
ten years later than what we thought EWB should be doing in development.
We don't build water points anymore.
As a matter of fact, we don't build anything other that spreadsheets.
Now we have this innovative marketing campaign
"Sponsor an African spreadsheet,"
because we understand that the problems are not hardware problems
is all about that software side of things.
It's a really hard concept to get across to people,
they still want to fund wells and schools,
but it's really about the software side of things,
and it's a lot longer process to fund those things; is not sexy, but it works.
So our staff members were really exited to share this failure internally
but we still were not doing a good job of letting other people know,
and some very courageous field staff were getting upset at the management
because other projects were making the same failures and weren't learning.
They pushed our management staff — and we were nervous about it —
about publishing our failures, but for the last three years,
EWB has published an annual failure report sighting our biggest failures.
At first I was asked, "How did your donors think?"
and I think how would my donors feel
if they knew that the money they've spent and saved up, and generously donated,
had had no impact?"
And you know, that's tough.
Our donors felt that too.
But once they started reading the failures,
they understood the power of those lessons learned
and realized is an injustice not to be sharing these.
Then we realized that no one reads reports so we built a site, admittingfailure.com.
This is for all organizations to come, and start admitting their failures,
and to start having a discussion about failure.
The concept is catching on.
The Harvard Business Review — just last month —
published their first review focused on failure.
Two big companies lately have also dealt with failure.
I'm talking to my friends in other sectors and they tell me
not only the development sector has these challenges, [it crosses to others].
Two companies had failures lately, and what's interesting about them
is that one publicly admitted their failure and talked about
what they've learned from it, what they're going to do next time.
The other one tried not to talk about it at all.
It will be interesting looking forward to see which of those strategies works.
Firstly, I'd like to ask people to think about
how does your organization think about and share failure.
Maybe ask the person next to you
because it can generate really interesting conversations.
And lastly, I'd like to turn back to this question, "Has aid failed?"
I think I'll say that, for me, the answer is 'yes, '
but only because it hasn't failed enough.
Thank you.
(Applause)