Prepare To Scale Up: Introduction

"The great challenge for successful community-based demonstration projects is how to expand their reach…without compromising quality."
Warmi case study

What is "scaling-up"?

Scaling up community mobilization means expanding the impact of a successful mobilization effort beyond a single or limited number of communities to the regional, national, or even multinational level. While the appeal of scaling-up is obvious, the challenge is to do so without diminishing the quality of the original effort.

Experience over the last decade is beginning to show that community mobilization approaches can be scaled up. This phase will look at some of these experiences and will lay out steps to help you scale up successful community mobilization approaches.

EXAMPLE: A Definition of Scale

While size alone is not a guarantee of program success or positive impact, program scale is frequently correlated with sustainable social change. To ensure quality of scaling-up approaches, it is important to continue to assess and document lessons that are applicable to broader social change efforts. Realistic indicators of quality and excellence for scaling-up must be established during the program design stage, including issues related to gender equity, empowerment and child-centeredness. Scaling-up typically takes one of four forms: geographical coverage (i.e., expanded beneficiary population); partnerships; policy and legislative-level impact; and new vision.

Geographic coverage is usually identified with reaching a larger beneficiary population through expanded service delivery systems and replication of effective development models. To achieve greater impact, we must reach greater numbers of people through a variety of strategies.

Partnership is achieved by working in collaboration with local, private, national governmental and international (bi- and multi-lateral) institutions. Partnerships can contribute to achieving expanded program impact. Partnerships can take a number of forms, including participating on a consultative basis with other agencies to strengthen institutional capacity and programming directions, providing technical assistance and building capacity with partner agencies in specific sectoral or management skills, or working jointly with other agencies with complementary capacities on shared objectives.

Policy and legislative-level impact. It is important to recognize the linkages between national and international policy and the standard of living at the grassroots level. Through strategic alliances with governmental and nongovernmental organizations, we can draw on our experience at the grassroots level to define and support policies that benefit more people.

New vision. New models of collaboration, new technologies, and new funding relationships can achieve social change on a greater scale than was previously considered possible. Patterns of greater collaboration among development agencies are emerging that provide innovative strategies for influencing future development planning, funding and perspectives.

(Save the Children -International Program Handbook, 1997)

Programs achieve scale either by starting out at scale (or very quickly going to scale) or through incremental efforts to expand coverage1. The four major ways programs typically scale up are by:

Planned Expansion: a steady process of expanding the number or sites for a particular program model once it has been pilot tested and refined2.

Explosion: sudden implementation of a large-scale program or intervention, without any cultivation of policy support or gradual organizational development prior to implementation.

Association: expanding program size and coverage through common efforts and alliances among a network of organizations.

Grafting: adding a new young adult reproductive health program (e.g.) to an already existing program.

Without significant uptake-the degree to which other significant development actors (e.g., NGOs, community-based groups, bilateral and multilateral agencies, host governments) adopt and adapt methodologies that organizations develop or promote- scale cannot be reached. Uptake is significantly different from replication in that the former involves adaptation of strategies or methodologies to fit varying program contexts. In order to achieve substantial uptake, an organization needs to:
  • Engage in experience-based advocacy
  • Garner recognition and attention for its work
  • Embrace monitoring and evaluation practices that produce credible results
  • Engage in effective networking and strategic partnering3

Why scale up?

Scaling up successful community mobilization approaches offers a number of benefits. Among other things, it can:
  • Extend the positive benefits of your program to more people who need and want them.

  • Maximize resources and the investment made in developing the approach.

  • Contribute to a growing awareness of the particular health and related issues that are of concern to the mobilization effort and help to foster changes in social norms.

  • Increase support for changes in policies and resource allocation related to the issue as more communities begin to address their needs.

  • Begin to address some of the underlying causes of health problems as a critical mass of people develop their knowledge and skills and build organizational linkages within and beyond individual communities.

ECUADOR: Scaling Up a School-Based Program

A school-based sexuality education program was initiated as a collaboration between Centro Medico de Orientacion y Planificacion Familiar/CEMOPLAF (an Ecuadorian NGO) and an American university, and eventually developed the support and endorsement of the government. The program went to scale by expansion, with phased replication of the initial pilot program.

The CEMOPLAF program had many reasons to believe that taking a school-based program to scale would succeed, given the following enabling factors:

  1. The documented high demand for the training and curriculum on the part of teachers, parents and students. CEMOPLAF staff were constantly asked by schools to provide information to adolescents on reproductive biology and physiology, changes during puberty, and other related topics. As a result, CEMOPLAF conducted a needs assessment to identify the overall demand for these services and others related to meeting youth's needs. The results of this assessment were used to guide the curriculum development process.

  2. The pilot project received funding and technical assistance to conduct extensive monitoring and evaluation. Feedback from all involved-the students, teacher and parents-was effectively used to make necessary changes.

  3. The partners benefited from the long-standing good relationship between CEMOPLAF and the Ministry of Education and Culture, as well as CEMOPLAF's good reputation for the provision of family planning services throughout the country.

  4. The program planners collaborated closely with local schools during the pilot implementation in order to build relationships with local partners and win their trust.

  5. After the success of the pilot project, the Ministry of Education and Culture officially endorsed the curriculum, which provided a strong boost for the expansion. Eventually, the collaboration led to their working together to draft legislation for the Congress for sexuality education in public schools.
Focus on Young Adult: Getting to Scale in Young Adult Reproductive Health Programs: A Synthesis of Experience, June 1999.

Common assumptions about scaling-up

Some of the common assumptions about scaling up are not always valid. Thus, it is worth exploring your own assumptions before you engage in this process. Some of these assumptions are:
  1. To move from your current program to scale is just a matter of expanding what you are currently doing.

    This assumption may hold true when a community mobilization approach is only expanded up to a limited point. However, most scaling-up efforts require the formation of partnerships to achieve wide coverage. When this happens, you will probably need to create new management and operations systems that can continue to support the program's core values and maintain quality. Even when an organization decides to expand its efforts on its own, it needs to create new systems to support growth while maintaining quality. It's not just a matter of expanding what you are currently doing!

  2. 2. Scale-up happens only through geographical expansion.

    Community mobilization programs may achieve wide scale impact through means other than geographic expansion. Communities participating in a "small scale" effort may identify policy issues that need to be addressed and may effectively advocate to change them at regional and national levels, thereby creating national level impact that can have highly beneficial results for people all over the country.

    With growing access to information channels such as the internet, radio, distance learning, video, television and print media, it is becoming easier for communities to communicate with each other and share their experiences. Ways to make media more interactive and participatory are being explored and have great potential to aid in scaling up demonstration or pilot efforts.

    Scaling-up can also occur when communities apply what they have learned in one CM effort to other sectors. In addition, increased participation can change political systems, particularly by people who may not have participated previously.

  3. 3. Scale-up happens naturally when the government and/or partnering organizations value the program.

    More often you will need to make a concerted effort to build awareness of the positive impact of a successful program to interest potential partners in the possibilities of going to scale with a new approach. The geographic isolation of some pilot programs, busy time schedules and divergent interests of potential partners, and preoccupation of program staff with program implementation often limit exposure of program successes and potential for scale.

    Even when there is great interest in the program, this does not mean that potential partners have the capacity, capabilities and/or resources to implement it. Policy issues may also need to be addressed before a major effort can be undertaken.

  4. Scale-up happens when health program managers, e.g., District/sub-District Directors of Health Services develop a mind shift towards acceptance of the new program and demonstrate the initiative to adopt it.

When to scale up

The timing of scaling up efforts can effect the outcome; here are some important questions to consider when deciding what is the right time to substantially expand:

Need: Is the issue that your program is addressing a priority regionally or nationally? Do health indicators support this?
Effectiveness: Have you proven that the proposed community mobilization approach improves health and a community's capacity to address its health and related needs?
Efficiency: Have you consolidated, defined and refined the approach so that it could be replicated or adapted by many others (individuals and organizations)?
Feasibility: Is there realistic potential for political and financial/resource support for the issue and the proposed community mobilization approach?

INDONESIA: Rushing to Scale Up

Experience from Indonesia in trying to scale up Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) too quickly to national scale demonstrated how trying to rush the process can lead to costly mistakes. Here are some of the things that were not yet ready at the time that expansion was attempted:
  • Strong top-down culture of development planning was not reconciled with participatory approach; it is difficult to tag on participatory approaches to existing national programs, as they often require other perspectives, values and methods.
  • Too few sufficiently experienced in-country trainers resulted in poor-quality classroom-based training.
  • The budget was unrealistic.
  • The time constraints were unrealistic.
  • There was poor collaboration between the government team and experienced NGOs.
Mukerjee, N. "The Rush to Scale: lessons being learnt in Indonesia" (Chapter 5 of Blackburn, J, et al Who Changes ? Institutionalizing participation in development. Intermediate Technology Publications, 1998, pp 23-29.

The answer to these questions should be "yes" if you want to effectively scale up the approach for maximum impact. Even when all the questions can be answered "yes", it often takes more time and effort than anticipated to put together all of the pieces of the scale-up puzzle. Later in this phase, we will look at the steps that were taken by three community mobilization projects that have gone to national scale or beyond.

STEPS

BEFORE YOU SCALE UP

  1. Have a vision to scale up from the beginning of the project.

AS YOU SCALE UP

  1. Define the roles, relationships and responsibilities of implementing partners.
    • Secure funding and other resources.
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    • Develop the partners' capacity to implement the program.
    • Establish and maintain a monitoring and evaluation system.
    • Support institutional development for scale.