Five Emerging Themes for Scaling Whole Child Development in Adversity
The perspectives on scaling offered here are intended to be helpful, in different ways, to people working across a wide range of roles, including, for example, program developers, community leaders, managers of agencies or organizations, and funders. The ideas arose from engagement with innovators as they explored both strategies and conditions for sustainable impact at scale; they are meant to complement comprehensive published scaling frameworks such as those referenced below.
- Connect Widely: Align and mobilize the wider stakeholder ecosystem – including organizations and people inside and outside of those organizations – to deliver core program benefits to families, as well as specific value to all stakeholder groups relevant to scaling.
- Discover, Learn and Adapt: Harness discovery, learning and adaptation as a primary engine of scaling and capacity building. Integrate international science with local wisdom, and base learning on a combination of rigorous approaches to data, continuous tracking and analysis of outcomes, and inclusive, peer-to-peer community and family engagement.
- Empower Leadership: Unlock, build and empower leadership and resources locally, and across the system, to mobilize communities and assure local accountability for impact.
- Rebalance Roles: Rebalance and renew roles of the front line (direct contact with users) and back end (support, management and program development functions) with an aim to build the agency, and align with the priorities, of local communities and stakeholders (at the front end), and to strengthen a culture of ‘collaborative leadership’ (at the back end).
- Play a Long Game: Treat scaling as a living, evolving process aimed at reshaping relationships through large and diverse systems over the long term. Reaching population scale across geographies can take years, and both during and after scale is achieved circumstances and delivery contexts change. This, along with cost pressures, can lead to impact degrading over time if the program is simply transferred to a large implementing organization, without allowing for active management of its on-going evolution. Ideally, innovators should plan to continue to support the scaling journey in new roles, working to embed the program in large systems, supporting on-going learning and adaptation, and innovating to solve the new challenges that scale imposes at different stages.
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You can start your journey by exploring Theme 1: Connect Widely
Related Resources and Tools
Useful comprehensive frameworks and toolkits for scaling include:
- Scaling Up—From Vision to Large-Scale Change: A Management Framework for Practitioners from Management Systems International
- Scaling Up—From Vision to Large-Scale Change: Tools for Practitioners from Management Systems International
- Scaling Up: A Path to Effective Development by Arntraud Hartmann and Johannes Linn
- Scaling up health service delivery: from pilot innovations to policies and programmes by Ruth Simmons, Peter Fajans, et al.
- Toolkit: Strategy to Scale Social Innovation for Development by John Lawrence et al.
See also this recent paper on scaling principles, with a useful bibliography as well: Scaling Up: Scaling Principles. by Richard Kohl and Johannes Linn, from the Global Community of Practice on Scaling Development Outcomes
Resources on scaling in early childhood development specifically include:
- The Scale-Up Effect in Early Childhood and Public Policy: Why Interventions Lose Impact at Scale and What We Can Do About It by John List, Dana Suskind, et al.
- An Integrated Stage-Based Framework for Implementation of Early Childhood Programs and Systems by Allison Metz, Sandra Naoom, et al.
- Achieving Lasting Impact at Scale, Part One: Behavior Change and the Spread of Family Health Innovations in Low-Income Countries from Social Research Unit at Dartington, UK
- Achieving Lasting Impact at Scale, Part Two: Assessing System Readiness for Delivery of Family Health Innovations at Scale from Social Research Unit at Dartington, UK
- Frameworks for effective implementation and scaling up of early childhood development interventions: a review of the literature by Vanessa Cavallera, Mark Tomlinson, et al.
- Gaining momentum: advancing early childhood development by Joan Lombardi
- Creating Vibrant and Sustainable Rural Communities: A model for developing sustainability in Early Child Development (ECD) centres, Mbashe, South Africa, from Bulungula Incubator
- What implementation evidence matters: scaling-up nurturing interventions that promote early childhood development by Pia Britto, Manpreet Singh, et al.
Syntheses based on innovations we have worked with include:
- Scaling early child development: what are the barriers and enablers? by Vanessa Cavallera, Mark Tomlinson, et al.
- Practical considerations for transitioning early childhood interventions to scale: lessons from the Saving Brains portfolio by James Radner, Marvin Ferrer, et al.
On leadership in ECD settings, cross-cultural community engagement, and integrating science with local wisdom:
- Tapping into Leadership in Early Childhood Development Centers: Learning from the Lived Experiences of Principals in South African Townships by Sibonelo Blose and Evelyn Muteweri
- Enculturating science: Community-centric design of behavior change interactions for accelerating health impact by Vishwajeet Kumar, Aarti Kumar, et al.
Relevant resources from a global community of practice on collaboration, leadership and social change: www.barefootguide.org