Permission to Fail Podcast

Host Kirsty Adams explores how setting big ambitions and daring to fail can inspire, elevate and take projects in new unexpected directions together with guests from SolarAid, John Keane (CEO), Richard Turner (Director of Fundraising) and Brave Mhonie, (General Director, Malawi), .

Why is Monitoring and Evaluation vital for change driven organisations and what does it mean to really listen to the people we work with on the ground? What can we learn from involving rural communities when we innovate to drive change, and what are some preconceptions development organisations often bring with them into the field?

Is restrictive funding holding back sustainable development for charities, and can funding with permission to fail better support organisations’ innovation work? Can funding with permission to fail work hand-in-hand with accountability, and what can funders and philanthropists learn from the development sector to ensure their investments are really put to good use?

How can we tell better and more authentic stories and who ultimately owns the story? What are the risks with charity storytelling and can it do more harm than good? And most importantly, how can we learn from past mistakes?

What can failure, learning and success look like when designing a new programme? Do we, as development organisations recognise the domino effects that our well meaning interventions can have on rural communities and the environment? And when recognising these, how can we turn them into opportunities? This is a case study of that.

In this last episode of Permission to fail – where the importance of the mission is more urgent than ever – we ask ourselves – what now? This episode is about new directions, and the future of SolarAid. In which ways has the sector changed over the past decade, and how have learnings from the past shaped the current direction of the organisation?