The Challenge
Picture a well in a remote village. A development organization spent €200,000 to build it three years ago. According to the quarterly reports, it's working fine. The project documents say "water access improved for 1,500 people."
The well broke eighteen months ago. The village went back to walking three hours for water.
Nobody knows. The next scheduled site visit isn't for six months. By then, the organization will have moved on to other projects. The broken well will become a statistic in an evaluation report: "Infrastructure maintenance remains a challenge."
Meanwhile, women walk six hours daily for water their children need to survive.
This story repeats across development projects everywhere. Not because people don't care—they do, deeply. But because monitoring is hard, expensive, and slow. Site visits are costly. Reports are manual. Problems hide between quarterly check-ins. And by the time anyone notices something's wrong, months of impact have been lost.
For climate adaptation projects, this delay can be catastrophic. When a coastal protection system fails, communities need to know immediately, not in the next quarterly report. When a reforestation project's trees are dying, intervention needs to happen in weeks, not months.
The gap between what's happening on the ground and what decision-makers know is where development impact goes to die.