Model Projects and the Difficulty of Predicting Future Success

Chapter 9 draws on the lessons of handpump tubewells, thalidomide, and DDT, to argue that global aid may have unanticipated long-term negative consequences that make predicting the overall future success of aid problematic. Further, since each aid context is unique, highly successful aid efforts in one context may face problems of replicability; they may also face problems of scaling up. Drawing on an example from education—the Rice School—Chapter 9 illustrates how projects can spectacularly fail even in seemingly ideal, local, circumstances, let alone in the far-from-ideal circumstances that attend most global aid efforts, where resources and education are severely limited, and the possibility of missteps are great due to social, cultural, political, historical, and, often, language differences. Chapter 9’s worries may apply to a lesser extent to some of the top-rated charities of organizations like GiveWell, but they don’t disappear entirely.