I’ve been delving into yellowed, typewritten 1970s archive reports in Dhaka to find out about failure.

Failing, after all, is fashionable these days. Silicon’s Valley’s “fail fast, fail often” philosophy is summed up by authors Ryan Babineaux and John Krumboltz in a story about a ceramics teacher who divides his students into two groups. He tells one group he’ll grade them purely on the quality of their single best work. He tells the other they’ll be graded simply by how many pounds of pots they make. In the end, the group graded by quantity alone ended up making better pots.

It may have generated plenty of backlash, with critics saying it’s just a trendy excuse for wasting investors’ money, but failure is powerful and important idea when done right. In development, where success is measured in indicators such as literacy, under-five deaths and maternal mortality, understanding how to fail well or “fail forward” is even more important.

Despite the vogue for failure, it’s not often that nonprofits admit to it. For one thing, people are not clay pots. We need to be careful about blithely celebrating failure when their lives and wellbeing are at stake, especially when it results from programmes that were poorly designed to begin with.

The students at the pottery wheels learned to do better through practice. It wasn’t the failure that got them their As. It was the iteration.



And Brac likewise, began with a succession of proverbial clay pots. In the Sulla project, named for a group of villages in a remote north-eastern region Bangladesh where Brac began in 1972, the young organisation constructed village centres where people could take free literacy and numeracy lessons in the evening. The goal was the complete removal of adult illiteracy in the intervention area within three years.

It was a dismal failure. In a 1976 report to donors, the frankness is jarring. Brac wrote that its field personnel were “too concerned with attaining construction targets without giving adequate attention to the objectives of the programme”. Sites were selected “without due regard to the convenience of the majority of the villagers”. As a result, at least a third of the structures fell into disrepair. “Despite the fact that this programme accounted for a substantial part of the Brac effort, the achievement of the programme was not commensurate with the effort.”

It gets worse. About 5,000 villagers signed up, but after 18 months, only 5% were still attending. Literacy and numeracy on their own “held no immediate benefit for the learners”. Classes were discontinued.

I asked Brac’s founder and chairperson, Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, where the idea for these community centres had originated. “The idea came from me,” he said. “I wanted to have some place in the village where people could congregate under one roof.”



And indeed that was the problem: the idea came from Brac, not the villagers. “After a hard days’ work who wants to go to a community centre to read and write? Something that will never come to any use for them,” Abed added.

Brac conducted a survey to identify villagers’ actual concerns. It then reintroduced classes with a new curriculum that taught them things that mattered to their lives. This included animal husbandry, health, nutrition and childcare. The completion rate rose to 41%. After a further revision that reintegrated basic literacy and numeracy, it rose to 54%. Building on the ideas of Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire, the idea was to create a “critical consciousness” that people could change their own lives.

It worked. Eventually, the classes were so popular that parents asked why they weren’t providing something similar to their children; this led Brac to launch its primary and pre-primary schools in 1985. This is now the world’s largest private, secular school system, with 10 million graduates who would not otherwise have had a chance to attend school. Programme organisers regularly visit the classrooms and test children on performance. Monthly refresher trainings for teachers are mandatory.

The early failure in the Sulla project shaped much of Brac’s later growth. Programmes that go to scale require multiple feedback loops, often overlapping.



To give another example, Brac trains more than 100,000 community health promoters in seven countries. These are self-employed women making money from the sale of vital health goods and services in their own communities. Though not on staff, they have no less than five points of contact with Brac supervisors every month. As with teachers, this also includes mandatory refresher trainings so that poor performance is identified and immediately addressed.

The point isn’t to fail, but to catch points of failure – and there will be many – within a complex system.



Scott MacMillan is a writer and manager for communications and outreach for Brac USA. Follow @WanderingSavage on Twitter.

This article was corrected on 2 April 2015. It originally misidentified Paulo Freire as Peruvian, when he was in fact Brazilian.

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