[Stoves] Failure

[Xavier Brandao]

Dear Alex,

"I just watched a TED talk that may (friendly) or should (judgmental)
interest this crowd."
Should, definitely. I am not saying any person or organization on the list
has specially had failures, but just that any person working in development
will know failure. Trying not to reproduce it often does not get all the
effort it deserves.

We can all picture in our minds a stove left to rust in a corner of the
kitchen, being used as a shelf for utensils and pots.

I was talking about that with a person working on a stove project (not from
this list), saying that people sometimes do not use the stoves. He said:
"yes, we have known that also"
"Does it happen sometimes or often?"
"Quite often actually?"

What is often? 50% of the stoves not being used? 40%? Even 30% is a big
failure, in my opinion. It is not about how many stoves have been
distributed, but about how many are used, or how many are used everyday.

I really like the sentence "Everything people see from Africa doesn't matter
and everything that matters from Africa, people don't get to see". That is
so true. The vision westerners have about Africa is caricatural. NGO play
with that, they are very talkative when they speak about the problems they
are fighting, the victims of the problems, the solutions they are
implementing. They never speak about what is happening few years after the
expatriates or volunteers left the region.
Sometimes, the message seems like: "a project with solar panels was done in
Benin, so many panels installed, so Benin/solar electricity: checked! What
country is next?". Even if only a school benefited from two stoves, you can
say a project happened in the country, and you'll have plenty of pictures of
smiling children and happy staff.

Xavier


-----Message d'origine-----

Message: 2
Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2011 18:38:18 -0500
From: Alex English <english at kingston.net>
To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves
	<stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>
Subject: [Stoves] Failure
Message-ID: <4EE53EEA.6060707 at kingston.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

Dear All,
I just watched a TED talk that may (friendly) or should (judgmental)
interest this crowd.

http://www.ted.com/talks/david_damberger_what_happens_when_an_ngo_admits_fai
lure.html

Highlights;
Engineers Without Border is now releasing Failure Reports and encouraging
others to do the same.
http://www.admittingfailure.com/

Alex