SCALING UP IN AGRICULTURE, RURAL DEVELOPMENT, AND NUTRITION


Overview: Pathways, Drivers, and Spaces JOHANNES F. LINN


Focus 19 • brIeF 1 • June 2012 T


aking successful development interventions to scale is critical if the world is to achieve the Millennium Development Goals


and make essential gains in the fight for improved agricultural productivity, rural incomes, and nutrition. How to support scaling up in agriculture, rural development, and nutrition, however, is a major challenge. This series of policy briefs is designed to contribute to a better understanding of the experience to date and the lessons for the future. There are many examples of successful scaling up. The


Green Revolution dramatically raised the productivity of farmers in many parts of the world; the microcredit schemes of Grameen Bank and (Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee) BRAC in Bangladesh helped millions of poor improve their livelihoods; the multidonor River Blindness Eradication Program controlled a debilitating disease affecting millions of people in Western Africa; and the conditional cash transfer program Progresa-Oportunidades improved the lives of millions of poor households in Mexico by offering them cash payments in exchange for sending their children to school and health clinics—a success story that has been replicated in many other developing countries. More typically, however, development interventions are limited


in scale and short-lived. Incoming political leaders tend to promote their own new initiatives rather than build on the success of their predecessors. Bureaucracies are plagued by a lack of continuity in leadership, a focus on the new and different, and a lack of effective evaluation of what works and what doesn’t. External assistance reinforces these tendencies. The number of governmental aid agencies and NGOs continues to expand, the number of projects supported by donors becomes ever larger, their average size ever smaller, and donors compete for the attention of recipient organizations with newer initiatives. To better manage the growing complexity of aid, donor and recipient countries have agreed on important principles at the High Level Forums on Aid Effectiveness in Paris, Accra, and Busan. This has undoubtedly helped, but what is still missing is a concerted effort to support a systematic scaling-up agenda on the ground. Scaling up is especially important for agriculture, rural


development, and nutrition because of the global challenges of food security and rural poverty. Although the diffusion of agricultural innovations can be spontaneous and rapid, often the path from research to widespread application requires systematic support from public, private, and not-for-profit agencies. Moreover, if the obstacles to reducing rural poverty and malnutrition are to be overcome, and if extensive, deep, and productive value chains for specific commodities are to be created, then appropriate institutional, policy, and investment strategies are required. Their goals must be to help successful interventions take hold, expand, and be sustained.


Scaling up: Introducing the concept


Systematic scaling up requires a perspective that sees beyond the traditional project approach. It explores from the outset and throughout the project cycle the potential scaling-up pathways that can ensure that a successful project is not a one-time event but the stepping stone toward a wider and sustainable impact. Scaling up expands, replicates, adapts, and sustains successful


policies, programs, or projects to reach a greater number of people. It is part of a broader process of innovation and learning. A new idea, model, or approach is typically embodied in a pilot project of limited impact; with monitoring and evaluation (M&E), the knowledge acquired from the pilot experience can be used to scale up the model to create larger impacts. The process generally is not linear but an iterative and interactive cycle as the experience from scaling up feeds back into new ideas and learning. Not every innovation can or should be scaled up, but


the experimental nature of the innovation process needs to be recognized as important in its own right. The risk of pilots not succeeding must be accepted as an integral part of the innovation and learning process. They pay their own dividends in lessons learned.


Pathways for scaling up


A scaling-up pathway is the sequence of steps that need to be taken to ensure that a successful pilot or practice is taken from its experimental stage through subsequent stages to the scale ultimately judged to be appropriate. Scaling-up pathways can follow different dimensions. They


may simply expand services to more clients in a given geographical area, for example, or they could also involve “horizontal” replication, from one geographical area to another; “functional” expansion, by adding additional programmatic areas of engagement; and “vertical” scaling, moving from a local or provincial engagement to a nationwide engagement. The latter typically involves policy reform and institution building to help achieve the policy and institutional conditions needed for successful national scaling up. It is important to define from a project’s start the scale to


which an intervention should or could ultimately be taken, given the needs of the target population and the nature of the intervention, and to consider realistically the time horizon over which the scaling process needs to extend. Along the scaling-up pathway the program should deliver intermediate results. This is necessary to allow for the testing and, where needed, adaptation of the approach. It also helps with ensuring the buy-in of the community, the government, and other stakeholders. M&E and rigorous impact evaluations are key ingredients of


a successful scaling-up strategy. During the implementation of the pilot, the intervention’s impacts need to be assessed and the stakeholders need to learn what the potential drivers, spaces, or constraints for an eventual scaling-up process can be. During the scaling-up process the assumptions about drivers and spaces must


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