| dc.description.abstract | Four decades of experience in development assistance
led many scholars to conclude that assistance efforts were
failing, in part, because implementing organizations too
often merely mechanically carry out rigid project
blueprints. Much of the information that is necessary to
a successful assistance effort cannot be known at the
outset. Organizations therefore must be able to learn
during implementation. They must be able to identify and
respond to social, political and economic obstacles to
their efforts; to experiment with their technological
interventions; and to practice how best to nurture local
participation.
While advocates of a "learning process approach" had
made it clear that creating organizations with a capacity
to learn was important, no one had undertaken an empirical
ii
study of how development assistance organizations learn in
practice. This study is an attempt to begin such an
investigation.
Five tree-planting programs in the Nyanza Province of
Kenya were analyzed to determine how these organizations
learned, what they learned, and what factors interfered
with the learning process.
This investigation reveals that while learning is not
a panacea for successful development, it is vital to
success; that it is possible to create organizations with
the capacity to learn and develop project plans that allow
the flexibility that learning requires. This research
also provides additional insights into the problems of
assuring effective participation in development programs;
and finally outlines an agenda for future research into
learning at other organizational levels of the
development assistance effort, as it is argued the real
breakdown in the learning process is not with the
implementing organization itself. | en |
