"The Underlying Reasons Why International Development Projects (IDPs) Fail: The Case of African Development Bank (AfDB)-Funded Projects"

Abstract

As pointed out by the United Nations (UN), the kernel of the project concept lies in its application to other than routine activities of an organisation or government agency, for purposes of special emphasis and action. Projects are thus appropriate ways to especially organise highly innovative, experimental/risky endeavours or those with high priority in development policy. As such, International Development Projects (IDPs), usually implemented to stimulate economic growth and development in developing countries, have become a major way through which development assistance is channelled into the developing world. However projects are especially difficult to plan and manage even in advanced industrial nations, but particularly so in less developed countries. The unique characteristic of projects, coupled with the nature of IDPs and the resource-constraint environment within which they are implemented, has produced disappointing results for the stakeholder-beneficiary dyad. The record of IDPs is therefore not so good; they have been reported to have ironically turned failure into a rule rather than an exception. Through empirical analysis, the study herein presented utilises completion reports of 53 African Development Bank (AfDB)-funded projects to investigate the reasons underlying the failure of IDPs. It identifies poor project Quality-at-Entry (QAE), weak project structure, poor control mechanisms, weak implementation capability and cognitive bias as the underlying reasons for their failure. It further identifies poor project QAE, poor control mechanisms and cognitive bias as the most prominent predictors of their failure. Findings of the study are especially beneficial to professionals in International Development Project Management (IDPM), development-oriented organisations as well as to the body of knowledge on international development. The findings also provide a useful platform for the incremental accumulation of further research on IDPs.