As Long as My Failure Don’t Kill Me it Makes Me Bolder

“Because I failed, I strive to champion change”

A failure is a project that doesn’t work, an initiative that teaches you that if one thing does not work, it is opening a door to things that might work; and the outcome does not move you directly closer to your goal. A mistake is a failure repeated, doing something for the second time when you should have known better, or a misguided attempt due to carelessness or selfishness

My biggest failure I have ever experienced in professional life, which has transformed to my rapid growth was when I thought I could do development works following my assumptions and instincts. I had not undertaken any formal professional training in the field of development but just a passion I had. I will decide to implement a development activity without any team and will not consult other experts or predecessors in the same field. I did that out of my selfishness and wanted praises for myself from my community members. I realized that every time I try, it ends up in failure and my community members will lose trust in me.

Whenever I want to implement an activity, because I thought I was a member of the community, my familiarity with community member is an advantage. With such assumptions I will not conduct a needs assessment to identify the specific needs and prioritize them. I will just use my imagination to bring in an activity taking advantage of my familiarity with community members. It has never succeeded and impact has never been measured. With several attempts and failures, I decided to go into my quiet self, research, review a lot of literature, had some time to think, seek counsel and look for strategies to succeed.

The first strategy was to enroll in a professional school where I studied Project Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation. During my studies which lasted for nine months (October 2012 to June 2013), I had a better understanding of my career and now has the ability to frame smart goals and objectives which gave me guide to my vision.

Upon graduation, my second strategy was to volunteer in an NGO whose activities promoted the kind of vision I have always wanted to promote in my community. My career focus and vision was based on disability inclusive development and the rights of women. While volunteering, I gained practical skills in project cycle management and activity implementation, reporting and auditing. I also gained practical skills in conducting needs assessment, needs identification/prioritizing and analyzing needs assessment data. I met collaborators and partners with expatriates in the same field from whom I continue to gain more skills and build a very strong network.

My third and must important strategy was to create a nonprofit community based organization whose mission is “improving the lives of single/teen mothers, women/girls with disabilities, widows, the old, orphans and vulnerable persons in local communities through education, economic empowerment, ICT and social amenities in collaboration with other groups that raises their standards of living”. Through the formation of this organization which has been approved and legalized by the ministry of territorial administration of the Cameroon government, I built a strong team of dynamic youths, experts and professionals who are out to champion change from grassroots to national and international level, both on and offline.

Through my failures in the field of development where I work, I have come to learn that

1. I don’t need to be the first but I can make that change that will impact lives.


2. I learn from those who have failed before and I never given up. From their experiences, I also have the courage to accept and learn from my mistakes during project implementation, reflect and accept the failure, then revisit my passion and keep pursuing my goals no matter what.


3. While there are things I can't do like implementing a project all by myself, most of the things I want in life I can have, but only if I treat my failure as a part of the learning process. I never see failure as an end, because it makes me a quitter. I always say to myself, “I am not a quitter but I am a failure”. I rather implement a white elephant project 3 times over and finally impact the change I need in the life of the community than quit.

“Mistakes have been an important part of my life, it has taught me to embrace risk, build resilience and learn from my mistakes. As long as I live in one way or the other I will make mistakes and when I fall, I fall to rise and never to fall again”

From 2015 when my nonprofit was approved by the government, and with the strong and dynamic team I have built, I have been able to conduct an in-debt needs assessment in my community, the data systematically analyzed, and needs prioritized and interventions have been done and are still going on successfully. Between 2015 and 2017 I have been able to successfully implement 3 projects, 2 of which are for the economic empowerment of women and 1 on sexual and reproductive health rights. These projects have impacted the lives of 18 single mothers, 7 teen mothers and 5 mothers with disabilities between the ages of 15 to 30 years. The community has generally benefited from these projects through the availability of the local detergent and soap which is sold in the community.

Learning from my failure has been straight forward and easy to adjust. As a leader, I don’t lay blames but bring my team together and ask people to reflect on what they did wrong and exhort them to avoid similar mistakes in the future. I assign a team to review and write a report on what happened and then distribute it throughout the organization.

I create and reinforce a culture that counteracts the blame game and make my collaborators feel both comfortable and confident with/and responsible for surfacing and learning from failures. I insist that my organization develop a clear understanding of “what happened” and not of “who did it” when things go wrong. I ensure consistency in reporting failures, small and large, systematically analyzing them, and proactively searching for opportunities to experiment.

In order to help spot existing and pending failures and to learn from them, I make it safe for my collaborators to speak up to me as a leader. I make my collaborators confident to share their understanding of the kinds of failures that can be expected to occur in our work context. And while openness and collaboration are important for surfacing and learning from them, accurate framing detoxifies failure. I go an extra mile to sometimes reward those who come forward with bad news, questions, concerns, or mistakes. Rather than shutting them, I celebrate the value of the news first and then figure out how to fix the failure and learn from it.

As I continue to learn from my failure striving to champion change, I have enrolled on online cousera courses to empower myself more, registered on online platforms like World Pulse, UN-Women Empower Women through which I was selected as a 2016-2017 Global Champion for Changes, twitter, face book, LinkedIn where I meet professionals in the same field of work on daily basis and learn from them.

I have become more open minded about what I don’t know, mistakes I’ve made, and what I can’t get done alone. This encourages others to do the same. I invite participation, ask for observations and ideas and create opportunities for people to detect and analyze failures and promote intelligent experiments. Inviting participation helps defuse resistance and defensiveness and I am committed to continue to champion change with or without failure.