|
|
|
|
|
|
by wozniacki
4222 days ago
|
|
|
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 annual cost of product failures in the US is $100 billion.
Big whoop. PlayPump is 0.1% of that. Your share of the PlayPump (assuming equal cost to everyone in the US)? A nickel. You don't just fund a PlayPump. You fund a thousand PlayPumps. Nine hundred fail, and one hundred have impact.
Someone tried to do good. Perhaps they didn't succeed. What happened as a result? They got ridiculed. That's the failure of PlayPump. Not the folks who did it, but the folks in 2010 mocking them. It brings about a culture which doesn't take risks, and that's a culture which cannot bring about change in the world.