So I just wrote this essay about all the reasons I think international development, as we currently carry it out, can never achieve its own objectives. One thing I didn’t have room for was the ideas I’m excited about, development projects that meet, at least partially, our outsized expectations of them. Here are two such ideas, and why I think projects like these—technical, slow, un-viral—are the future of development.

Payment by Results

For those of you who’ve never implemented a development project, here’s how it works: You write a proposal to a donor. They agree, in principal, to fund your idea. Then you negotiate what your ‘indicators’ will be. These are the data points the donor will use to determine if you did what you set out to do, whether your project was successful.

Let’s say you’re proposing a project in Zambia, you want to decrease malaria rates. You get the European Commission (EC) to give you $1 million to train Zambian nurses to go house to house handing out malaria treatments, training mothers on symptoms and doses.

You and the EC come up with some indicators they’ll use to evaluate your project after it’s finished: You have to provide 10 training sessions per year, they have to be attended by at least 20 nurses, and all the nurses have make 1,000 home visits within a year of the training.

These sound pretty robust, right? The donor is saying, if we’re gonna give you money, you have to spend it like you told us you would.