Devex: What Went Wrong? Perspectives on Failed Aid
“Global development organizations jump at the opportunity to showcase their best projects, to point to the lives they have improved, to the positive change they have brought about through months — or years — of hard work in communities around the world. And rightly so. But when it comes to discussing impact and outcomes, the aid industry can be less inclined to ask a simple, but crucial, question about projects that didn’t go well … ‘What Went Wrong?’ is a citizen journalism project that focuses a critical lens on failed foreign aid interventions — whether they are stalled, unfinished, broken, insufficient, unusable, or otherwise unwanted. … Devex has collaborated with the team behind ‘What Went Wrong?’ to produce six investigative stories exploring why some of these projects failed to deliver. These six articles aim to help shed light on the wide array of reasons aid projects go off track, while showing the potential benefits of putting people at the center of the conversation about what works and what doesn’t…” (February 2019).