We Keep Measuring the Wrong Things in Village Development

I came to development work from a world of dashboards, and I brought my love of metrics with me. I still believe in measurement. But after enough time in the field, I have a confession: a great deal of what we so carefully count tells us almost nothing about whether a life got better.

The tyranny of the easy number

We count toilets built, not toilets working. We count girls enrolled, not girls who still attend in March. We count training sessions held, not skills anyone retained. We measure these things not because they matter most, but because they are easy to photograph and put in a report. The easy number quietly crowds out the true one.

A toilet built and locked is a statistic. A toilet built, working and used is a changed life. Our reports often cannot tell the two apart.

What I wish we measured instead

• Did it still work six months later? Durability, not just delivery. Anyone can hand something over. The question is what survives the year.
• Did the girl gain a choice she did not have before? A bank account she controls, a skill she can sell, a door she can now open herself. Agency is the real product.
• Would it continue if we left tomorrow? If a programme collapses the day the project ends, we did not build capacity. We rented an outcome.

Why we avoid these

These questions are uncomfortable precisely because they are honest. They are slow to answer, they sometimes make our work look smaller than the brochure, and they cannot be totalled at the end of a quarter. So we drift back to the easy numbers, and the easy numbers drift back to flattering us.

I am not asking anyone to stop counting. I am asking that we count at least one hard, true thing for every easy, flattering one. The girl at the end of our spreadsheets does not live in the columns we find convenient. She lives in the ones we keep avoiding.