by Laura Freschi
Goods for sale. Photo credit
The NYT recently ran an article chronicling the failure of the now-abandoned Women’s World Market, a 2007 donor-funded mall on the outskirts of Kabul. The project was set up with money from GTZ, the German bilateral aid agency, the small business arm of USAID, and the private savings of an Afghan entrepreneur.
Here are a few facts about the project:
- the mall was planned for an out-of-the-way location that attracted little traffic
- the goods sold were already commonplace
- the prices were set much higher than Afghans could afford
- the prices were also much higher than those of comparable goods nearby
Now, I don’t have an MBA, but the chances for success on this project sound low. The Times reported: “Ueli Müller, who oversees GTZ’s Women Employment Promotion Project, said that the question being asked before any economic program gets support today, no matter how well-intended, is: What are the market linkages? And where are the customers?”
It’s a relief that GTZ has developed a grasp of these obvious principles. Here’s hoping that other aid agencies are keeping up.
At least aid agency officials—from GTZ and Unifem— are talking frankly about past failures, using specific examples about what went wrong and why. Perhaps future failure discussions will convey more subtle lessons.
3 Comments
and then they didn’t even include in the accounts for the mall the lavish GTZ salary and perks for Ueli Müller.
Sure Ueli is worth it though, let’s hope there’s soon a new project that needs oversight and expertise.
who would have though… economic principles apply to aid agencies and their projects as well. Sadly, this hurts all those involved who it intended to help. Do these agencies even have economic advisers. This stuff is taught in econ 101 in high school.
This is probably off-piste, although it’s geographically relevant: the changing/deteriorating security climate in Afghanistan is a significant impediment to aid and development. The whole chicken-egg riddle of you can’t have development without security (and vice versa) is nonsense. In a fragile security environment you can have stability interventions. Usually such interventions are highly contextualised. Many donors fail to grasp the fluidity, felxibility, and responsiveness/autonomy such programming demands.
Ready-made development interventions that conveyed well in other contexts (i.e. The ubiquitous success story) often don’t work in complex conflict-riven contexts.
This is why armed organizations are better placed to perform such work (PRTs, supported by USAID military affairs, etc.).
Many European donors are simply far too process-oriented (great for development, not stabilization) to be able to realistically hold out that they can make a meaningful aid intervention in such a pixelated and rapidly shifting context. They would probably do better to listen to NATO and CENTCOM and procure the choppers and other support that have been repeatedly requested for so long!!