The Pilot Trap
Across East Africa, there are hundreds of technology pilots that never graduated to production systems. Data collection apps that worked for three months, then were abandoned when the champion moved on. Dashboards that were live for one donor reporting cycle, then fell into disrepair. ERP systems that cost six figures to deploy and were never fully adopted.
This isn't a technology problem. It's a strategy problem.
Why Pilots Fail to Scale
After working with NGOs and government offices across Rwanda, we've identified three consistent failure modes:
1. No ownership model. The implementing organisation sees itself as a service provider, not a partner. When the project ends, so does the relationship. There's no internal champion with the authority and budget to maintain the system.
2. Technology chosen before problem defined. A donor funds "a data management system." The implementing partner deploys whatever they know how to deploy. The organisation gets a solution to a problem they didn't necessarily have.
3. Capacity not built, only delivered. Staff can use the system while the implementing partner is present. Six months later, when something breaks, no one inside the organisation knows how to fix it.
Our Framework
Before any technology project, we work through four questions:
1. What decision will this enable? If the answer is "better data" without a specific decision attached, we push back. 2. Who owns this after we leave? We name the internal owner and build the system around their capability, not ours. 3. What's the failure mode? We explicitly design the graceful degradation path, what happens when the internet goes down, when the champion leaves, when the budget is cut. 4. How do we know it's working? A specific, measurable indicator that the system is delivering value not uptime, but business impact.
Technology that sticks is technology that was designed to stick from the beginning.
