There is a lot of discussion in aid on scaling up small-scale successes in aid to reach many more potential beneficiaries. But what things can be scaled up? Here are some principles so simple that they would be embarrassing except that they are routinely violated in aid.
(1) Scale up success not failure
The only reason for mentioning this is that the aid business has a strange habit of trying to scale up again things that have already failed. PROGRESA is the great success story of scaling up something after you had determined it was successful.
(2) Don’t scale up what you think is most important, scale up what you do best
There are lots of important issues, so why not choose the one that you do best? And let the people who are good at the other issues work on the other issues? Yet both official agencies and NGOs are often pulled away from what they do best by well-meaning politicians and funders who are focused only on final goals.
(3) You can scale up only what requires cheap, abundant inputs; you cannot scale up something that depends on expensive, scarce inputs
This is one of my problems with the Millennium Villages – they at least partly depend on world-class experts flying in to solve idiosyncratic problems of each village. World-class experts are a scarce resource that you can’t scale up.
(4) Things that you make routine are among the easiest to scale up
It worked for Henry Ford, McDonald’s, and WalMart, why not in aid? One of the secrets to success of the large vaccination campaigns that reduced child mortality was that relatively unskilled medical workers (in abundant supply) could give vaccinations as a routine activity. Of course, not everything can be made routine. For a more complex discussion about social service delivery in general, see the great paper by Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock.
(5) Evaluate whether you are still successful after scaling up
Scaling up often changes the nature of what you are doing, so evaluate whether the scaled-up version works as well as the original version.
I’m sure readers have other principles to suggest — please do so!
11 Comments
Great post. I agree with all of the principles above. Allow me to add one additional principle:
Successes have to be replicable to new contexts before they can be scaled up. Too often it is assumed that a successful intervention from one setting can be taken to scale in any context. The result is that the scale up fails because the earlier success was dependent on a unique set of conditions. Evaluation has to not only measure success, but identify the factors of success so programmer can decide where scale up is appropriate.
Another “great post” comment from me!
Footnote to #2) If what you do best is not industry best practice, or even good practice, don’t scale up. Just stop doing it.
I’d re-state Mr. Barnes comment above approximately as follows: Don’t assume because something works well and can be scaled up in one context that it can necessarily be scaled up in another. Every context requires nuanced approaches for even those interventions that seem most basic.
This is good, specific examples would make it a lot better.
SS
I don’t know whether mine is a corollary to #3 or a new one:
You can scale up what has a transferable management: inputs and tools are abundant or can be easily created or transferred.
I’m thinking mainly about knowledge-intensive projects but many other things may apply.
FontlineSMS is the best example I can think of:
- input is mainly knowledge. What is not abundant (usage of mobile phones) is easily transferable (how to build the network and operate the software — apologies for the simplification).
- tools are, again, knowledge; the software, which is freely available; mobile phones, quite “cheap” around; and some desktop PCs, again quite “cheap” everywhere.
BTW, just discovered your blog: loved your Sex, Aid, and Rock & Roll analysis
i.
On the second point, does-it make sense to scale up something useless even if we’re good at it?
only scaling up aid if the governance of the country significantly improves.
The aid will be a waste anyway, as all previous scaling ups,
but the improved governance might actually help people.
You can’t scale up what people don’t truly understand, need, or want…
This is true of clean water: why is it still a problem when supplies and labor for simple wells are abundant?
Superstitions and local customs are not to be discounted. One sub-Saharan Africa example http://bandwidthout.org/2009/07/pride-and-hydration/ There were endless variations on this.
That’s why COMMUNICATION is the most important thing to scale up, especially among peers. It scales virally, can be low or no-tech…
I welcome suggestions for getting funders and implementers to prioritize this.
Thanks!
You can only scale up policy or institutional reforms when there’s a winning coalition to push them through and sustain them. Aid donors talk about ownership in a general way: political leadership, ministry leadership, senior officials, and champions are all said to be needed. A proxy for ownership is when the Government announces a reform strategy filled with ambitious plans and promise; donors say this is a sign of political will, and they throw money. Workshops and study visits are common devices to build “ownership”.
What’s needed instead is an understanding of key stakeholders that would benefit/lose from reforms, leading to a plausible successful coalition of supporters that could form to support a specific set of reforms, and what their roles need to be as the reforms go ahead (perhaps leading to a different formulation of the nature of the reforms, or a restructuring if project already approved), and a process approach for making it happen (and making sure reforms aren’t reversed by opponents). This rarely happens in my experience, but when it does, reforms supported by aid donors can be scaled up and succeed.
This is a very instructive post!
The point 5 implicitly means also (the other way around) that if a pilot does NOT work well, the bigger scale may still work. Because of the general equilibrium effect that are not present at the pilot level…
One approach that the WB is advocating for is to get the governments to design the assignment to their programs in a way that it can be evaluated easily. This gives the opportunity to starts with a big enough scale and then to improve along the way if necessary.
I like the approach but obviously it has it own flaws. One of them being that in some cases, instead of providing the program to the people it will presumably serve most, they just randomize…
Wonderful blog post by my fave devt celeb..
Just one point (I am not sure but you may have mentioned this somewhat in your post):
Scale up should pay for itself.
If the scale up is not going to make the operation more self sustainable in the long run, it probably isn’t worth scaling up in the first place. If this does not happen, it will be difficult to measure success…besides, the point of aid is an end to aid…a scale up should close shop..and in a good way
Enjoying shift in language from; can social enterprises scale, to, how to’s of scale.
Managing network based enterprises teaches that(echoing Aboyeji’s comment) the best designs naturally scale. Focusing on infrastructure; creating platforms for exchange of local resources and creativity, promotes self-sustaining solutions that not only scale, but become viral.
These solutions follow a principle expressed in a quote from Keith Hoffman, (paraphrasing) “the job of (NGO) social enterprise is to express the needs of a community in the market place,” to motivate creation of value in context to these needs. The resulting needs based exchange, lifts the community and builds ecosystems that grow along with it.