Embracing Failure: Changing the Lens of Impact
In this powerfully reflective panel, development practitioners, sector veterans, and young changemakers confront the uncomfortable truths about failure in social change. They challenge the institutional reluctance to name failure, the arrogance in elite circles, and the tendency to attribute change where none exists. With poignant stories, personal admissions, and honest critiques, the speakers urge the sector to go beyond vanity metrics and performative conferences to truly acknowledge when strategies fail, and to iterate courageously.
The conversation underscores the need to abandon failing strategies while holding onto worthy problems. It explores how systems fail by design through misplaced subsidies, ignored grassroots wisdom, and data-free decision-making. More importantly, it stresses that genuine change requires reframing who holds knowledge, valuing local experiences, and being honest about the lived outcomes of interventions.
Speakers emphasized that failure must be documented, revisited, and shared. The sector must reject binary debates of models and methods, and instead embrace humility, accountability, and collective learning. Only then can the promise of impact truly be fulfilled, not in celebratory numbers, but in changed lives.
