Learning from development success : some lessons from contemporary case histories

This paper describes 18 successful cases, success being defined as concrete achievement in 4 basic areas - management effectiveness, resources and services, spread and equity, and local capacity building. Cases range in scale (from subvillage to national levels), location (urban, rural; Latin America, Asia, Africa), and type of institution (public, private, third sector), but have common themes: (1) committed people and their values matter; (2) social vision in the leadership was typical; (3) the organizations involved developed processes for continuous internal learning and they had respect for and learned from their clients and their environment (decentralized structures and processes made such learning practical); (4) the organizations were relatively or completely autonomous from the larger environment; (5) the poor were mobilized to create some sort of organization in which they felt a sense of ownership and responsibility; (6) flexibility of processes and procedures was present in many ways; (7) most cases started quite small and built organizational capacity layer by layer or region by region; (8) creativity in funding mechanisms to multiply actual resources was common; and (9) group effort was more efficient and effective than were social service programs aimed at the individual poor.