Kahkabila, Nicaragua. Photo: Alissa Emmel

There are a lot of different ways to get things done. But while I was researching Taking Action, I kept noticing some of the same things in successful development projects all over the world, from small initiatives in out-of-the-way places to well-funded international agencies. The list below isn’t meant to be exhaustive, but it does distill ten common themes of many of the development projects I’ve seen work. Have more? Add them below.

1. Keep learning, and apply your knowledge

Layli Miller-Muro investigated the legal resources available to immigrant and refugee women in Washington, D.C., after she received a flood of requests for assistance following her successful legal defense of a 17-year-old asylum-seeker fleeing polygamous marriage and female genital mutilation. She learned that few organizations helped women facing gender-based violence, so she acted by starting the Tahirih Justice Center. In 2007, TJC received the Washington Post Award for Excellence in Non-Profit Management.

2. Think outside the box

Millions of people lack electricity for refrigerators. So Mohammed Bah Abba of Nigeria invented Pot-in-Pot, a device made out of two clay pots with water-soaked sand between them. The water seeps through the outer pot and evaporates, which uses up heat and keeps the contents of the inner pot cool. The pots have become popular in Nigeria, reviving the local pot industry, giving married women a side business of selling fresh food from their homes, and allowing girls to go to school without having to worry that the food they have to sell will spoil. (From the book Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21^st Century.)

3. Don’t be afraid to experiment

Massachusetts Institute of Technology instructor Amy Smith always looks for new ways to do things. Through her D-Lab, she trains engineers to work with people to find simple solutions to complicated problems. For Haiti, which is 98 percent deforested, D-Lab developed a cooking fuel made from sugarcane remnants to spare trees that would otherwise be used for charcoal. (From the book Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21^st Century.)

4. Encourage scientific thinking

Successful businesses, like good development projects, are built around available information and modify their approaches based on evaluated results. After Seventh Generation conducted a test that found that energy was being wasted and CO2 released when customers heated their cleaning solutions, the natural household products company reformulated the cleaners to work as well in cold as in hot water. (From my book Taking Action in a Changing World.)

5. Share technology

One of the reasons homeless people have difficulty finding jobs and housing is their inability to collect voicemail messages from potential employers and landlords. In 1994, Bahá’í communities in the San Francisco Bay area banded together to solve this problem by providing free voicemail to homeless individuals and families. By 2003, with the partnership of more than 60 public and private service agencies, from Catholic Charities to the Red Cross, the project was serving the needs of more than a thousand people. That year, more than 54 people received job assistance, 87 received housing assistance, and 233 “received other help that involved the use of the voicemail system,” according to the Sonoma County Task Force of the Homeless. (From the 2004 study In Service to the Common Good.)

6. Show people their inner nobility

In Ghana, the Enlightening the Hearts literacy program has worked with more than 22,000 underserved students. A survey of certain participating junior secondary schools from 2002-2006 showed a tripling of literacy rates. The program works not only by helping students overcome their prejudice against their own native language, but by using texts that emphasize their own capacity to gain virtues. (From ONE COUNTRY newsletter.)

7. Empower new voices

In the mid-1990s, the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements started a development project in the Afghanistan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, where due to war inflation was skyrocketing, the infrastructure was overloaded and social services were virtually nonexistent. Representatives of UNCHS met with the city’s men to find ways to develop the community, but met with little progress. Finally, despite resistance from the men, they consulted with the women, who responded by establishing Community Forums. These forums eventually produced funds for a clinic, a dispensary, a literacy course, a library and kindergartens. The women also improved public infrastructure such as water supplies and solid waste collection. (From my book Taking Action in a Changing World.)

8. Increase participation

Villager participation in natural resource management programs, soil fertility management trainings, and other services improved the work of agricultural extension services in Benin, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Madagascar, and Mali, according to evaluations of the projects. The Netherlands Royal Tropical Institute and the World Bank also found that “to foster development it is not enough to focus on agricultural extension services, rather communities must be involved in decisions affecting all aspects of development.” (From the report Village Participation in Rural Development, published by the Royal Tropical Institute and the World Bank.)

9. Bring people together

If you want to increase the likelihood that governments will fight disease, help people to overcome their differences. That’s the implication of a new study in the journal Comparative Political Studies, which found that “When societies are ethnically divided and fragmented,” governments spend less per capita on HIV prevention and a smaller percentage of people who have HIV gain access to retroviral drugs.

10. Foster consultation

Dr. Howard Wolpe, director of the Africa Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, initiated a strategy of putting Burundi leaders into long-term trainings in collaborative decision-making to help them forge a new consensus on how decisions are made. The goal was to help leaders who thought their people’s survival could only come at the expense of other groups to recognize their own interdependence. Dialogue to resolve mutual problems reduced conflict in a country where many experts had expected genocide to occur at the beginning of the last decade. (From a talk at the Global Conference on the Prevention of Genocide, 2007.)