"If you've already built an elevator to the first floor, why not take it all the way to the top?" Vidhya Sriram talks about the journey of savings groups (also called VSLAs) at CARE, and what it took to think not just about scale, but also about the biggest benefits to women. VSLAs do build savings and income, but they can also do so much more. She talks about understanding what women themselves aspire to, not what we aspire for her. She also talks how savings groups can be a platform for...

What happens when you don't see the results you hoped for in your project? If you're Dr. Nahla Abdel-Tawab from Population Council, you publish your results, learn from them, and try again. Some of the biggest barriers they faced were: assuming that private sector health solutions were the answer, asking workers the wrong questions about what they needed, and not understanding the context that garment factory workers in Egypt deal with when trying to access health care. Great examples of...

What does it take for people and the planet to thrive? We have to show up. C.D. Glin, President, PepsiCo Foundation and Global Head of Social Impact, PepsiCo. After decades in social impact, government, and philanthropy, C.D. talks about some of his earliest lessons as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the new South Africa, and the inspiration of Nelson Mandela’s quote, “I never lose. I either win or learn.” Appreciative inquiry, meeting people where they are, and knowing you don’t have all the...

What happens if we stick with business as usual? We fail by default. C.D. Glin, President, PepsiCo Foundation and Global Head of Social Impact, PepsiCo, Inc talks about food systems are failing women, and what companies can do to correct for that. Thinking with a whole of company approach, beyond just philanthropy, is critical. Companies have to use their profits, their products, their procurement, their people, and their markets if we’re going to achieve #zerohunger. He talks about how...

Tahira Nizari and Barnabas Mtelevu talk about what it took to overcome the challenges in the tea sector in Tanzania, and how assuming that smallholder women farmers could immediately join a global supply chain demanded new partnerships and new plans. How do you grow from an individual farmer to a business? Don't assume it will happen automatically. Just because you're a businesses doesn't mean it will work. On the other hand, you can't assume a development project is set up to meet market...

You've commissioned an analysis to understand the dynamics for women and young people to build a better program, and the results are disappointing. They're too general, too high-level, too obvious. They're accurate, but not useful. What went wrong? Well--you're not alone. MOST of the implementers in the Gender and Youth Activity have the same experience--gender analyses are often disappointing because we do them wrong. What's the solution? Get more focused, have managers involved in the whole...

What happens when your consultation processes go off the rails? Lauren Beriont from The Emgergence Collective talks about how a lot of our feedback and co-creation processes face three major problems: 1) They assume a trust that does not exist between different stakeholders 2) They are centering the wrong actor--the donor or the most powerful group in the process--instead of focusing on the impact the world needs to see. 3) They are looking to validate a plan that is already in place (but...

What's in a logo, and why does localization need to include participant-led logo design? Zinat Ara Afroze and Sairana Ahsan explore the logo competition to have frontline service providers design a logo for their own services. What did they learn? Only 9 people out of a potential 450 participated in the competition the first time around, and understanding why not, and what level of understanding it takes to draw a logo that sums up your job showcased how much more shared understanding there...

Inspired by his recent blog post on From Poverty to Power, Duncan Green reflects on why it's important to learn from failure, and some of his own failure stories. "Think before you jump", and "be a reflectivist as well as an activist" are some of his key pieces of advice to people working in the sector. He's got stories about playing chess from the management bunker, evidence-based humility, and How Change Happens, the second edition paperback and Open Access that's coming out starting from...

"I wish I had known that my biggest source of learning would be my field colleagues. ...I believed in textbooks." Dr. Muhammad Musa reflects on 41 years of work in international development. His two biggest lessons are: learn from your frontline staff, and tell stories with impact. Some lessons he learned in the decades are to build a fearless climate--a climate of trust, where staff at all levels can learn from failure, and can take time to reflect. He also notes that moving from a project...

The Feed the Future Mali Sugu Yiriwa operates in the Delta Zone of Mali, aiming to strengthen the resilience of farming and business communities through market-driven, inclusive, nutrition-sensitive, and agriculture-driven economic growth. However, the complex nature of Mali’s political situation poses significant challenges to program implementation and participant outreach. In this episode of the Failing Forward Podcast, Laurore Antoine, Chief of Party for Sugu Yiriwa, shares valuable...

Christabell Makokha talks about always anchoring innovation to the success metric: have I solved the problem? Instead of focusing on the process, focus on the problem, and whether or not people's lives are getting better. She reflects on why innovation labs fail (inspired by this article from ICTworks). What's going wrong? We define innovation as "the next new thing" rather than leveraging creative problem solving. We struggle to find the balance between stand-alone innovation work and...

You’ve done the desk literature reviews, collected and conducted field studies, crafted and deployed surveys, analyzed the data, written up the results, and released your study findings. Is it having any real influence or impact? How do you know? Laura Kim and Michelle LeMeur of the Canopy Lab wrestled with these questions when they attempted to trace uptake by stakeholders of their studies on COVID-19 and the international development workforce:...

Titukulane's progress was achieved by addressing the failures it faced in the years leading up to 2023. When the program was first implemented, the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world, making it extremely difficult to implement field-level activities. However, Titukulane was able to turn around its failures by starting from the roots and addressing every aspect of the program. They focused on team building and cross-functional teamwork, built the capacity of the M&E teams, made field...

Maria Alemu and Gregory Makabila talk about the Ifaa project's Failure Summit, and what it took to create a culture where failure spurred reflection, learning and action. Lessons from Saint Yared, a learning from failure roadmap, pre-mortem exercises, and the 5 Whys of Failure were all key tools that helped the team learn, adapt, and improve. Check out their reflections, what they would do differently, and the diverse range of tools that helped the team embrace failing forward. Ifaa is a...

It's not easy or obvious to not only work with adolescent girls in crisis settings, but also to let them lead. But it is possible. AMAL currently operates in Syria, Nigeria, and Somalia, addressing the unique vulnerabilities of adolescent girls in crisis settings, such as early marriages and adolescent pregnancy. The program includes components like a Young Mother's Club, Community Dialogues, and a health provider curriculum to improve sexual and reproductive health service uptake and enhance...

Katharine Nasielski, Pari Chowdhary, and Brittany Dernberger talk about Fast and Fair-- CARE's work trying to get COVID-19 vaccines out to the world to meet the global deadline for 80% vaccination rates by September 2022. Advocating for funding and policy change, running programs to support vaccine delivery around the world, and trying to measure global to local impact are all places where we've learned a lot about what we need to do next time. Because like it or not, we need to prepare for a...

If you looked at a problem and thought, "the answer is more capacity building and more guidelines" Florence Santos says you might need to think again. Based on her experience leading Monitoring and Evaluation at CARE, she's seen a proliferation of tools and resources that aren't really solving the underlying solution. If it's the recommendation you would always have made under any circumstances, you're probably not looking carefully enough at the solution. Florence reflects on how she would...

CARE implemented the Inspiring Married Adolescent Girls to Imagine New Empowered Futures (IMAGINE) project to design & test interventions aimed at delaying the timing of first birth among married adolescents in Niger (Zinder region) and Bangladesh (Kurigram district) between 2016 and 2022. Rachael Goba explains how the IMAGINE journey went on married adolescent girls envisioning, valuing and pursuing alternative life trajectories. For example, after 22 months of implementation,...

Frontline health workers play a critical role in delivering health services globally, especially to the hardest to reach populations. Despite their importance to health systems and universal health coverage goals, this majority female workforce faces diverse and ongoing barriers affecting their working conditions and capacity.   Pari Chowdhary talks about how at CARE, we aim to bring support and work with and for FLHWs to achieve healthy outcomes across our programming countries, but also, we...

This time on the other side of the mic, Emily Janoch talks about what it takes to truly move from learning to changing the choices we make, and the hard commitment to "do it differently, not just next time, but every time after that." We all need to be accountable to impact. How do we remove the idea that we are the heroes of the story in development, and how do we acknowledge our own privileges, let them go, and learn to deploy them for others instead of ourselves. Christabell Makhokha...

Monalisa Salib wants you to get cozy with the context. If your theory of change is full of assumptions and logical statements that could easily be true anywhere in the world, it's probably not going to work. Only by understanding the context where we operate and respecting the actors and the expertise in that context will real change happen. That means knowing the specific players, actors, and dynamics where change gets done. Another tip she has for you: people matter more than process, and...

Natacha Brice--who runs CARE's work on Village Savings and Lending Associations in Emergencies (VSLAiE)--wants you to know two things about doing group savings in crisis settings: 1) It is possible, and it will have big impacts; 2) it's going to take a lot of hard work to do it right. You can build capital in crisis, which changes how we think about both our long term programming and our emergency response. There's a lot we've learned on the journey. Thanks to Beja Turner for hosting!

Why do we spend so much time and money on gathering data we never use? Why can't we always find the data we need to make good decisions? Christina Synowiec from Results for Development talks about Getting Rigor Right, and article she co-authored on deciding how rigorous data needs to be based on the decision you are trying to make. Sometimes you need quick, indicative data. Sometimes you need people's voices. (Often you need both). You always need data, but only sometimes do you need the most...