Below is the opening paragraphs for “Community Group Entrepreneurial Projects: Why Do Projects Go Wrong?” by Terry Leahy.
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One of the great puzzles of development work is the way money can easily be spent without much result. In much of Africa, colonial governments spent a lot of energy dealing with the problems of land degradation and food security in the rural areas that had been reserved for black people. The “native reserves”, “homelands” and so on. Very often these projects did not work and problems continued. It seemed no great surprise that these projects had often failed in the colonial period – or during apartheid in the South African case (Hoffman & Ashwell 2001). According to development theory, without the active participation and good will of the recipients, projects will inevitably succumb to social inertia and resistance (Pretty 1995; Bunch 1997). It was expected that subsequent programs would not suffer the same fate if they were built with genuine bottom-up participation and had been initiated by an elected majority rule government.
This chapter and the following chapter examines why projects are still failing despite these major political changes. In these chapters I will certainly be considering whether it is better for poverty relief to organize projects that are commercial or projects that are for subsistence. However I will be foregrounding a question of a different kind. What kinds of project work? Do projects realize the goals set by the people who founded them? Do they keep working after the development team has departed?
To begin to understand this large scale persistent failure it is necessary to work out what kinds of projects are being delivered. Only by having a typology of projects is it possible to talk systematically about the likely problems and advantages of particular kinds of project in this region of Africa. My view is that these problems and advantages are far from random. They relate to the cultural and economic context of the rural villages of Africa – the issues considered in the previous chapter. Because of this, some types of project are absolutely certain to fail while others have a chance of success, depending on how they are set up. While the matters considered in these chapters relate to a great variety of African countries, I will concentrate on South Africa and Malawi for examples here.
In the case of South Africa I was introduced to these issues by my students, who were agricultural officers from South Africa who came to Australia as part of a “LandCare” initiative – an aid project of the Australian government. The first students came to Australia in 2003 and in their research essays they were writing about the projects that they had implemented as extension officers. In 2006, I went to South Africa and stayed in several villages with local people as well as touring around with agricultural officers in the rural areas, looking at the projects they were working on. I followed this up with other visits in 2009 and 2010, also taking in other African countries. My most recent trip was in 2014. All of this experience tells me that the issues raised in this chapter are not confined to South Africa. The project designs that I started to find out about in 2003 are still dominant all these years later. To back this up I will be giving some examples from interviews with agricultural officers from Malawi in 2013, as well as some more recent examples from South Africa itself.
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