Though mistakes have a positive side—they offer opportunities for improvement—the immediate effects are often costly and difficult to correct once mistakes are made. In business, each mistake is by and large paid in terms of financial loss, reduced profits, or damage to a company’s reputation. Take, for example, the headline-making grounding of the new Boeing 787 Dreamliners and the resulting loss of hundreds of millions of dollars for the company.
All due to a seemingly simple mistake in the choice of the lithium-ion batteries used. Safety tests and the grounding of the entire flagship fleet along with a ban on flights over Europe, the U.S. and Asia resulted in a 26 percent drop in Boeing’s share price. Even greater damage was done to the company’s reputation, at a time when competition with Airbus could not have made the stakes higher.
In the business sector, these “lose-lose” situations effect actors in the entire business chain; from stockholders and employees to suppliers and buyers.
The same cannot be said to apply to the development sector. These agencies, like their business counterparts, spend much of their time and resources in planning. They invest the same energy in mitigating risk, in project planning and monitoring frameworks, and they include the entire range of expected results, impacts and mitigation plans. And never do we hear of mistakes made on the scale of Boeing’s. This begs the questions, do development agencies make mistakes? If they do, who are they accountable to? Certainly not vocal shareholders and a hungry business press.
Considering the intensive and rigorous planning and monitoring practices these agencies follow, one might be tempted to think that they either do not make costly mistakes, or if they do, they quickly learn from them and improve practices.
If their own internally generated presentations and reports are to be believed, their work either results in a list of positive impacts, such as lifting ‘poor and marginalized groups out of poverty’, or on the rare occasion that mistakes are made, they are handily labeled ‘lesson learned’. Away from press attention, these ‘lessons’ keep on happening, hardly producing negative consequences to anyone; creating a win-win situation.
In business, each mistake is paid in terms of financial loss, reduced profits, or damage to a company’s reputation.
We hear development agencies stating that they are accountable to their donor countries and to host governments and communities. In practice, this is not the case.
Development agencies do not often scrutinize the mistakes of their own projects. Instead they are wrapped in an external evaluation report where some recommendations, posing no direct penalties to any party, are expected of the report writer. This allows development agencies to ignore the government and communities they serve with little, if any, blowback. After all, these hosts are naturally reluctant to look their gift horse in the mouth and demand accountability and its consequences.
It would be better for development agencies if they were more accountable and accepted their mistakes, while bearing the consequences. The state, communities, civil society and media should keep a close watch on their activities.
pokhrel2012@hotmail.com
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