Failing Forward: what the water sector can learn from things that go wrong

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Thomas Edison’s words could be the motto for this edition of the Waterproof podcast, where guests share what happened when water projects didn’t go quite as planned – and what the sector learned from it.

This article is based on the ‘Failing Forward’ episode of Waterproof, a podcast by Partners for Water.

A quiz show about menstruation might seem like an unusual way to start a conversation about water and sanitation failures. But that is exactly what Esther Shaylor, Innovation Manager at UNICEF and part of the WASH Failure Movement, did – using humour to break down the barriers that keep professionals from openly discussing what goes wrong.

In the Waterproof podcast episode ‘Failing Forward’ Tracy Metz speaks with four guests who have all, in their own way, learned that progress in the water sector often comes through trial, error and honest reflection.

Talking about failure openly

Esther is the driving force behind the WASH Failure Movement. She has spent years encouraging colleagues to speak openly about projects that did not go as planned. “We really want to talk about failure,” she says. “We want to openly and freely share it so that we can learn from it.”

That openness has surfaced some striking stories. In Afghanistan, pipes were laid to bring water directly to women’s doorsteps – seemingly a clear improvement. But for many women, the daily walk to collect water was also their only opportunity to leave the house and meet others. The result: some damaged the pipes themselves so that water collection, and the social contact that came with it, could continue.

Then there is the story of the jerrycan. UNICEF set out to design and manufacture an improved jerrycan for emergency settings, investing heavily in research and a custom mould. When it was finally tested with users, however, most still preferred the original product. “This is something I have learned repeatedly,” Shaylor reflects. “We need to define what success looks like before we start.”

When good intentions meet a different context

For Zahid Amin Shashoto of Uttaran, a grassroots organisation in southwest coastal Bangladesh, failure is often less about technology and more about context. In the 1960s, Dutch-style polders were introduced to support intensive farming. But unlike in the Netherlands, water that entered these polders could not easily get out, leaving the land waterlogged for months at a time.

“My community is primarily farmers,” Shashoto explains. “And if farmers don’t have farmland – if it’s underwater – they go out.” Many farmers leased their flooded land to large-scale shrimp farmers, introducing saltwater onto land that had supported rice cultivation for generations.

“Serious mistakes were made in thinking that Bangladesh looks very much like the Netherlands, which it doesn’t,” Shashoto says. “The technology itself isn’t bad. But introducing the technology without considering the context is a mistake.” A related lesson came from a project that provided arsenic and salt filtration systems for drinking water: highly effective, but too costly for communities reliant on government subsidies to maintain once the project ended.

Uttaran’s response has been to shift towards what Shashoto calls a “negotiated approach”: channelling funding directly to communities so they can address water, education and land issues together, as a collective.

A safe space to fail

At the Green Village, a field lab at TU Delft, failure is built into the design. “For us, it’s interesting to look at things that are new, that are not yet applied or not yet validated,” explains Lindsey Schwidder, programme manager for climate adaptation. “And here, they are also allowed to fail.”

One entrepreneur tested a pavement substructure made from recycled glass waste, designed to store rainwater underground. The product worked, but because it was officially classified as ‘waste’, every delivery required a separate environmental permit. The barrier was not the technology, but the paperwork. Eventually, the material was reclassified as a building material, resolving the issue.

Other experiments reveal similar friction. Lighter-coloured pavements could reduce summer temperatures by several degrees, but municipal style guides often prescribe specific colours, making adoption difficult. And for green parking spaces designed to let rainwater filter into the ground, it is not always clear which municipal department is responsible for maintenance. As Schwidder puts it, making climate adaptation work requires bringing legal experts, financial teams, contractors and maintenance departments to the table, not just engineers.

Failure as part of diplomacy

Even at the highest levels of international water diplomacy, things do not always go to plan. Former Water Envoy Henk Ovink, who now leads the Global Commission on the Economics of Water, recalls preparations for the 2023 UN Water Conference with Tajikistan. Early on, communication stalled: “There was a shopping list from the Netherlands on what needed to change. And on Tajikistan’s side, there was the question: why do we need to change course?”

By investing time in understanding each other’s perspectives, the relationship recovered and strengthened. “We made the mistake of being too preoccupied with our own ideas,” Ovink reflects. “But we learned fast, and it really paid off.”

For Ovink, this is the essence of failing forward: “A lot of things go wrong before things really go right. Learning is exactly what failure is all about.”

As Edison put it, failure is just another way of finding out what does not work. Across the water sector – from UNICEF’s jerrycans to Bangladesh’s polders, from Delft’s experimental pavements to UN water diplomacy – the willingness to examine what went wrong, and why, is what turns setbacks into progress.