nextDid you ever wonder what a pilot project has to do with piloting? The comparison to aviation can hardly be an accident: You set your eyes on a destination, you start from a known position, you cover un-chartered ground, you monitor your coordinates and, hopefully, you arrive where you had planned to be.
In many UNICEF offices, this analogy may not work well, unless you include flying in loops and circles, parachuting, aimless drifting, flights of fancy, and missions into outer space into your choice of conveyance.
As a particular form of a demonstration project or a serious piece of research, piloting can be one of the most effective programme strategies[1]. A pilot simulates the possible effects on children and women of a proposed policy change, or tests the feasibility of a proposed national plan or programme. It can be our most important input into the development of a PRSP or SWAp, and the cornerstone of evidence-based policy advice. But a recent survey on the state of piloting in UNICEF country programmes did not bear this out.
Many of the reviewed pilot projects did not clearly state what they were to achieve, or the hypothesis, assumption or action to be tested. Less than half had a baseline. One office knew there was a pilot but not more, because the project officer got transferred. An analysis of the costs of the pilot, and the costs of the resulting policy recommendation or scaled up programme was almost never done. Virtually none of the reviewed pilots ended up with a plausible advocacy document making the convincing point for larger policy change.
I am sure we don’t have to be borderline neurotic to dig deep for creative approaches, learn something new and write it up. And if more of us who managed a pilot project would have turned out a learned treatise, we and the world’s children would be further ahead.
[1] Sometimes also referred to social modeling.
(18 March 2005)
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