For more than a decade, Sub-Saharan African governments have borrowed management philosophies from the private sector, backed by World Bank financing, in the hope that measuring performance might make governance more accountable. A recent analysis of 73 such projects reveals that ambition and reality have remained stubbornly apart — only a third of initiatives met their goals, and one in ten never began at all. The deeper lesson is an old one: institutions are not interchangeable, and reforms designed for one soil rarely take root unchanged in another.