CARE Failing Forward

A Solution Without a Platform

What happens when you build a brilliant solution that solves problems years ahead of it's time, but you have no platform? It fails. You can't get it to the people who cou

Ok, fine. But we won't buy that.

"Ok, fine. But we won't buy that." That's what farmers kept saying when presented with the tractors the best experts in the world said they needed. Jehiel Oliver from Hel

Don't scale the excitement; evaluate what's working.

The smartest move in AI today is to evaluate what works before you scale on excitement alone. What happens when Low and Middle Income Countries start pulling investments

Why family stability matters for your chocolate

Cocoa income comes just twice a year, but families need stability every day. Carol Miloky (CARE) and Fatou Ndiaye (Mars) unpack what they learned from a decade of working

Start By Listening

Amanda Larson and Aimee Mateo talk about building health technology in the Philippines. HEAL Hub is an app that helps local health workers stay up to date on training and

Plan for when it breaks

Ask yourself, 'Did the system become stronger because we were there?’” That’s the biggest piece of advice Nelima Otipa and Nithya Ramanathan from Nexleaf Analytics have f

Who is it working for? The messy realities of AI in practice.

What happens when your brand new tool makes things worse for low performing entrepreneurs? Or restricts your most successful teachers so they can't unlock the full power

Why AgTech Startups fail

Robots that get stuck in the mud, a "successful" product a farmer will never use more than once, and a financial model clients can never pay for. Listen to Ankit Chandra

What you're probably doing wrong with AI: Failures, Lessons, and capturing 60 years of data

Lindsey Moore was working in AI before most of us knew what it was, and she can tell you the most common mistakes to avoid. Ignoring context, building ever more precise m

How is your smartphone like HIV?

Eric Kaduru and Julia Arnold talk about why simply distributing phones doesn't help people--especially women--access the internet. After seeing free phones get broken, st

The app and the enterprise: when not to build new digital tools

CARE has a more than 30 year history with savings groups--starting from the lowest tech version you can possibly imagine: 25 women with a box and a notebook in Niger. Bui

We Built a Women-Centered GPT. It Flopped – and Taught Us Everything

What happens when you try to build an AI tool that works for women entrepreneurs – and it totally flops? In this episode of Failing Forward, CARE’s Koheun Lee and Sarah H

Beyond Money

"If you've already built an elevator to the first floor, why not take it all the way to the top?" Vidhya Sriram talks about the journey of savings groups (also called VSL

Nothing to Lose: Garment Factories in Alexandria

What happens when you don't see the results you hoped for in your project? If you're Dr. Nahla Abdel-Tawab from Population Council, you publish your results, learn from t

Thrive

What does it take for people and the planet to thrive? We have to show up. C.D. Glin, President, PepsiCo Foundation and Global Head of Social Impact, PepsiCo. After decad

Failing By Default

What happens if we stick with business as usual? We fail by default. C.D. Glin, President, PepsiCo Foundation and Global Head of Social Impact, PepsiCo, Inc talks about f

What the market wants

Tahira Nizari and Barnabas Mtelevu talk about what it took to overcome the challenges in the tea sector in Tanzania, and how assuming that smallholder women farmers could

Scary Conversations

What happens when your consultation processes go off the rails? Lauren Beriont from The Emgergence Collective talks about how a lot of our feedback and co-creation proces

What's in a Logo?

What's in a logo, and why does localization need to include participant-led logo design? Zinat Ara Afroze and Sairana Ahsan explore the logo competition to have frontline

Learning from Humiliation, Shame, and Failure

Inspired by his recent blog post on From Poverty to Power, Duncan Green reflects on why it's important to learn from failure, and some of his own failure stories. "Think