A few weeks ago, I sat on a panel in a room full of women, and I have not quite been able to shake it since. It was not the cameras or the styling, though we all showed up. It was something silent. You could feel a question moving around the room, even though nobody said it out loud.
Am I doing enough? Is any of this actually working? Does it count?
I know that question intimately. I have asked it of myself more times than I can count, usually in the long stretches when nothing on the outside suggested anything was happening on the inside.
What surprised me was how familiar it felt in a much larger context. Because it is more or less the same question many of us keep asking about development on this continent. We have spent years, and no small amount of money, building things that were meant to change lives. Some of them did. A good number did not. And when I look honestly at the gap between the two, it rarely comes down to the size of the cheque.
Anyone who has worked in health or technology in Africa knows the phrase “the graveyard of pilots”. It is where good ideas go to rest. A promising programme is designed, funded, launched with significant energy, and celebrated. Then the funding window closes, the partner moves on, and within a year or two the thing simply stops. Not because it was a bad idea. Often it was a very good one. It stops because it was built as a project rather than as part of a system, and projects, by definition, end.
