Why Intervention Programs Fail in Africa: We Assess Too Late
This reflection starts from personal experience. Over years of working in clinics, communities, and programs in Nigeria and the United States, I formed an opinion first and checked it against the literature afterward. In research, an opinion like this is an hypothesis. Mine is this: school feeding programs, health services, and infrastructure projects in Africa fail for many reasons, but one runs through nearly all of them, and that is weak assessment.
Three kindsof evaluation
In publichealth and policy, program evaluation generally takes three forms. Formativeevaluation happens before a program launches and in its early stages. It testswhether the design fits the community's needs, culture, and capacity. Processevaluation happens during implementation. It asks whether the program is beingdelivered as planned, to the right people, at the right quality. Summativeevaluation happens at or after completion. It measures outcomes, meaning short-and medium-term changes, and impact, meaning long-term change that can beattributed to the program.
In much ofAfrica, summative evaluation is the one that gets done. It often happensafter a program has ended, and sometimes years later, when the money is spentand the damage is already done. Formative and process evaluation tend to betreated as optional. But assessing a program while it is running matters asmuch as judging it once it is finished. A problem caught in month three canstill be corrected. The same problem found in year five can only be explained.
Theevidence: school feeding in Nigeria
Nigeria'sschool feeding history shows this pattern clearly. A national program waslaunched in 2005 but was discontinued after federal funding ceased; it wasrevived in 2016 and grew to a reported 9.9 million beneficiaries by 2022, thenstalled and was formally suspended in January 2024. When federal money stoppedin 2007, ten of the twelve pilot states abandoned the program within a shortperiod, leaving only Kano and Osun continuing on their own.
The monitoringthat did exist measured the wrong things. A 2026 IFPRI review found thatmonitoring systems focus more on the number of children fed than on whether theprogram is achieving its intended education, nutrition, and livelihoodoutcomes. The same review notes that monitoring and verification weaknesses areconsistent across program eras and states, from unidentifiable beneficiaries atthe federal level to the absence of reliable meal-distribution tracking inZamfara state. Process data was also failing to reach decision-makers. Cooksreported that aggregators did not always deliver food as planned, but thesereports did not reliably reach program management. Even after suspension, noindependent public account of the ministerial review has been released, leavingthe sector without a clear, evidence-based diagnosis of what failed.
This is not acase of school feeding failing as an idea. The IFPRI authors put it plainly:the main issue is not whether school feeding can work in Nigeria. It can. Whatfailed was the system for watching it work.
Theevidence: water points that stop working
Infrastructureshows the same pattern. A 2019 review estimated that roughly one in fourhandpumps in sub-Saharan Africa are non-functional at any point in time,equivalent in 2015 to about 175,000 inoperative water points. The timing ofthese failures is revealing. Water point data from 11 countries showed highfailure rates early after installation: almost 15% after one year and 25% bythe fourth year, indicating widespread problems with poor-quality installation.Failures that early are exactly what formative and process evaluation aredesigned to catch, and what an end-of-project evaluation misses.
What thismeans for Impact Project
For ImpactProject USA & Africa, the lesson is that assessment is part of the workitself, not paperwork done at the end. A program should begin with formativework: listening to students before designing a food or wellness health programfor them. It should run with process monitoring that tells us, while there isstill time to adjust, whether we are reaching the students we intended toreach. And it should end with summative evaluation that measures outcomes, notonly how many people showed up, and that is shared publicly, including what didnot work.
Programs inAfrica rarely collapse overnight. They decline slowly, in ways that would bevisible if anyone were measuring. If we start assessing from the beginning, wehave a chance to fix problems while they are still small.
AliyuTijani, is the founder of Impact Project,USA & AFRICA.
https://www.impactprojectaid.com/
References
Foster, T., Furey, S., Banks, B., & Willetts, J.(2020). Functionality of handpump water supplies: A review of data fromsub-Saharan Africa and the Asia-Pacific region. International Journal of WaterResources Development, 36(5), 855–869. https://doi.org/10.1080/07900627.2018.1543117
Banks, B., & Furey, S. (2016). What's working,where, and for how long: A 2016 water point update. 7th RWSN Forum, Abidjan,Côte d'Ivoire.
Nwagboso, C., Orjiakor, E., Kirui, O. K., & Balana,B. (2026). What will it take to sustain a national school feeding program inNigeria? Lessons from two decades of implementation (NSSP Working Paper 72).IFPRI.
