The Problem With International Development and a Plan to Fix It

  In 2010, “Frontline” returned to the schools where they had filmed children 
  laughing on the merry-go-rounds, splashing each other with water. They 
  discovered pumps rusting, billboards unsold, women stooping to turn the wheel
  in pairs. Many of the villages hadn’t even been asked if they wanted a 
  PlayPump, they just got one, sometimes replacing the handpumps they already
  had. In one community, adults were paying children to operate the pump. 

  Let’s not pretend to be surprised by any of this. The PlayPump story is a sort
  of Mad Libs version of a narrative we’re all familiar with by now: Exciting new
  development idea, huge impact in one location, influx of donor dollars, quick
  expansion, failure.

Frontline Video from 2005 "The Play Pump" :

http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/watch/player.html?pkg=entr...

Frontline Video from 2010 "Troubled Water" :

http://video.pbs.org/video/1533347949/

The Silicon Valley "success, scale, fail" process doesn't work in Silicon Valley either if you look at average long term returns to average VC investors, rather than all the positive side effects.

The difference is that the returns from successfully scaling up in SV make those successes glaringly obvious and desirable to emulate

Scaling up across 105 more villages, on the other hand, simply produces more anecdotes for the pitch deck for the next wave of funding, which will need a bigger amount (and face a greater chance of it being hampered by evidence of something, somewhere having gone wrong). Appropriate milestones and accurate measurement are as much a part of the problem as the solution. Imagine gauging the relative suitability of an early Pets.com and Amazon for follow on funding not from their sales, SV style, but by interns flying out to foreign lands to quiz villagers on how their purchases had improved their quality of life.

I think you missed the journalist's jaded sarcasm embedded in "No one will ever be invited to explain that in a TED talk."

I'm guessing TED has had 50+ presentations on "solutions" for Africa over the last 5 years. We'd expect that some of the ideas have failed to deliver. However, we can't expect TED organizers to give stage time to followup presentations explaining why they failed (or why the ideas at smaller scope didn't scale up to large one like they hoped.)

So yes, we would get more value out of hard-hitting TED talks explaining warts and difficulties but we can't expect TED themselves to highlight it. A similar concept is "publication bias" against negative or non-repeatable research results:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias#Definition

This reminds me of the account of NGOs ( Non Governmental Organizations )- key functionaries in the dispensation of foreign aid - in Jim Rogers' book, Adventure Capitalist: The Ultimate Road Trip, something I read many many years ago:

  "Even in countries with no roads to speak of, Mercedes service is available – often
  to the exclusion of things like food – thanks to all the US foreign aid, the IMF,
  and World Bank money being shipped in.  It is no secret that this money is aimed at
  nourishing only those corrupt enough to get their hands on it, while at the same 
  time fattening the bureaucrats on both sides of the transaction who diligently 
  work the trough.  And none of them is driving a Chevy.

  I knew much of this from my last trip.  The upcoming trip, especially as it took
  us through Africa, would be an eye-opening education into the workings of the
  latest foreign aid scam: the nongovernmental organization, or NGO.  As an American
  taxpayer, I would be amazed to discover that a lot of the money we send to these 
  countries goes to support Mercedes and BMW dealers and various Swiss bankers."

  "After cocoa, the commodity produced in greatest abundance in the Ivory Coast is to
   be found in the commercial capital, Abidjan, one of the more cosmopolitan cities in
  West Africa: NGO bureaucrats.  They grow here in enormously high concentration, even
  for Africa.  They and their like have been directing Africa’s destiny for centuries. 
  One might wonder why so many national boundaries in these parts consist of straight
  lines.  In Germany in 1884, at what was called the Congress of Berlin, the European
  powers came together and divided up Africa.  They paid no attention to religious,
  ethnic, linguistic, tribal, national, or historical differences – the Ivory Coast,
  for example, is divided between a majority Muslim population in the north and those
  who hold to indigenous beliefs and Christianity in the south, explaining why peace
  in Africa may be far away.  And why there will always be work for Western
  bureaucrats." [1]

On the other hand, this is what Bill Gates has to say on corruption and why it should not be a deterrent to the continued giving of foreign aid:

  There is a double standard at work here. I’ve heard people calling on the government
  to shut down some aid program if one dollar of corruption is found. On the other 
  hand, four of the past seven governors of Illinois have gone to prison for 
  corruption, and to my knowledge no one has demanded that Illinois schools be shut down
  or its highways closed. [2]

Even fully discounting the fact that the man is unimaginably wealthy and can afford the graft and misuse of funds, I am still not quite convinced by this line of reasoning. At this point I'm just hoping that I don't wake up some eight years from now to discover that even things like Kiva loans [3] had been all along a huge waste of effort, time and - yes - money.

[1] Adventure Capitalist: The Ultimate Road Trip

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0812967267

[2] 3 MYTHS THAT BLOCK PROGRESS FOR THE POOR

http://annualletter.gatesfoundation.org/#section=myth-two

[3] Kiva Is Not Quite What It Seems

http://www.cgdev.org/blog/kiva-not-quite-what-it-seems