ABSTRACT
This essay examines two USAID education projects that ran in northern Nigeria from 2004 to 2009. It argues that development planners need to pay greater attention to historical and contextual factors in project design, implementation, and evaluation. Practitioners often pay lip service to the importance of history in shaping the problems of the present, but strict deadlines and funding caps make it more practical to import models from other countries than to design activities tailored to local circumstances. While these imports may yield a successful aid project in the short run, the failure to accommodate local context means that even successful activities do not often survive the end of project funding.
