Scaling Up the Fight Against Rural Poverty - FIDAfrique

• policies, as in assuring appropriate legal and regulatory frameworks for land ownership and
use, for natural resource management, financial intermediation, etc.
During the learning phase the experience with the design and implementation of the pilot is monitored
and evaluated and a knowledge management process ensures that the lessons learned enter into the
IFAD-internal knowledge base and through dissemination contribute to the external knowledge base.
In the scaling up phase the original idea, model or approach is brought to scale drawing on the internal
knowledge base generated by the pilot and on external knowledge where appropriate.
New
idea,
model,
approach
jlinn@brookings.edu
Figure 1: Innovation, learning and scaling up
linkages
Pilot,
Project
Limited
Impact
M&E,
Learning
& KM
2
10
Internal
knowledge
Outside
knowledge
Scale up
Multiple
Impact
A number of observations can be made with regard to this innovation-learning-scaling up triad.
1. Innovation, learning and scaling up should be treated as separate, albeit linked processes.
Each of the three concepts refers to an important separate stage in the development of an intervention
at scale, and each requires its own appropriate process, skills, resources and attention. Innovation and
scaling up are often complementary, but there are also times when they compete in terms of resources,
managerial attention, political pay-off, etc.
2. Development actors (including IFAD) need to focus not only on innovation, but also on learning
and scaling up.
Over the last decade innovation was elevated as the main objective of IFAD’s interventions. While
other development institutions have generally been less explicit about this, in fact this principal focus
on innovation is endemic in the aid industry and the development business, usually to the detriment of
an adequate focus on learning and especially on scaling up.
3. The innovation-learning-scaling up process is not linear, but an iterative and interactive cycle.
As indicated in Figure 1, there are many feedback loops between from learning and scaling up back to
innovation. Indeed, monitoring and evaluation often generates new ideas for better design and
implementation and the scaling up process will often require adaptation and innovation in the way the
original model or idea is brought to scale. Nonetheless, it is useful to think in terms of the three main
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