This is a follow-up post to my previous one over the lack of adequate diagnosis by Engineers Without Borders in determining the cause of failures they have admitted. Here I turn my attention away from the admitting failure process to address the substance of EWB’s failure. It is also specifically a response to Erin Antcliffe’s [...]
Posts Tagged ‘expat technical advisers’
17 Jul
Good for personal development, bad for economic development
Ranil Dissanayake has written a perceptive elegy to his time in East and Southern Africa. “I will miss the constant obstacles, challenges, fights, compromises, small victories and major changes that come when working in a developing country Government here. There is no such thing as a simple task in Government: a photocopy could take an [...]
22 Jun
Learning by Doing
Kudos to Owen Barder who has no lesser a dignitary on his Development Drums podcast than Tony Blair. Some of his answers are slightly evasive, suggesting to me that you can take the man out of front line politics, but you can’t take the politician out of the man. But he has also got some [...]
7 Feb
Good strategies need good implementation
We’ve just submitted another funding application. As is usual in such cases I took on the lion’s share of the writing. Indeed this is one of the most important roles played by me and my peers in other small NGOs about the developing world. We’re the rain-makers for three reasons. Firstly our command of English [...]
8 Dec
SNAFU redux
When I first conceived of my previous post it had a rather different character than it ended up: a testament to the immediacy of blogging, and how one’s thoughts can take one in unexpected directions. Lindsay’s original post, which is far better than any of my analysis, had a powerful tinge of sadness about it. [...]
1 Dec
SNAFU
Lindsay Morgan also dispatched her personal thoughts from her trip Southern Sudan. The post had all the usual ingredients, grizzled veterans, impossible projects, crazy donor expectations, poverty that won’t go away and that might get worse when you leave, constant travel to uncertain ends. One word summed it up for me: SNAFU. It was coined [...]
7 Sep
Parallel Worlds
Yesterday I wrote about the subtle language divisions to be overcome here. In pacifying the provincial officials whom we had irked my local colleague took most of the “blame”; as an expatriate the officials appeared to expect that kind of behaviour from me, but they thought that my colleague should have corrected it and ensured [...]
