Scaling Up the Fight Against Rural Poverty - FIDAfrique

components of the process as distinct and separable phases each of which has its own important role to
play.
4. Not every innovation can or should be scaled up. Not every scaling up needs to involve an
innovation.
Many innovations may not be suitable for scaling up. It is precisely the experimental nature of the
innovation process that needs to be recognized as important it its own right and the risk of pilots not
succeeding must be accepted as an integral part of the innovation and learning process. Failed pilots
may offer as many lessons as successful ones. But of course, failed or unsustainable pilots should not
be scaled up. By the same token, not every scaling up effort needs to involve an innovation generated
by IFAD. As we shall see in the examples cited throughout this report, many of the cases where IFAD
has successfully scaled up involve ideas or innovations that others had first piloted. This is
appropriate: what matters most is to improve the lives of as many rural poor as possible.
5. Scaling up involves two types of possible errors: “type 1 error” – too little scaling up; and “type 2
error” – wrong scaling up.
Much attention in the scaling up literature and also in this review of IFAD’s experience focuses on the
prevailing lack of attention to scaling up – what we refer to as a “type 1 error”. But there are also cases
where scaling up takes place, but is done in a wrong way – a “type 2 error”. The latter type of error is
found more frequently in the large development banks, such as the World Bank, which can and often
do aim to go to scale in their country strategies and programs. Evaluations of their programs have
critiqued insufficient piloting, testing and learning as well as inappropriate phasing of approaches that
gets in the way of effectively operating at scale.
C. Designing pathways of innovation, learning and scaling up
In general there are many possible pathways for scaling up a successful intervention. By “pathway” we
understand the sequence of steps that need to be taken in the innovation-learning-scaling up cycle to
assure that a successful pilot is taken from its experimental stage through subsequent stages to the
scale ultimately judged to be appropriate for the intervention pursued. For each case IFAD needs to
explore potential pathways early on and take proactive steps to plan and prepare for scaling up – in
terms of dimensions, desired ultimate scale, drivers and spaces, IFAD’s operational modalities,
intermediate results, and monitoring and evaluation.
Selecting the “dimensions”: Scaling up pathways can follow different “dimensions”. They may simply
expand services to more clients in a given geographical space. They can also involve “horizontal”
replication, from one geographic area to another; “functional” expansion, by adding additional areas of
engagement; and “vertical” up-scaling, i.e., moving from a local or provincial engagement to a
national-wide engagement, often involving policy dialogue to help achieve the policy and institutional
conditions needed for successful national level scaling up.
Defining the desired scale: It is important to define up-front the ultimate scale to which an intervention
should or could 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 in order to
achieve the desired ultimate scale. Hartmann and Linn (2008) found that successful scaling up of
programs to national scale can take five to ten years, or longer.
Focusing on key drivers and spaces for scaling up: There are two sets of factors that need to be
considered in designing the appropriate pathway for any given case (Hartmann and Linn, 2008):
• “drivers” – these are the forces pushing the scaling up process forward (see Box 1); and
• “spaces” – these are the opportunities that can be created, or potential obstacles that need to be
removed to open up the space for interventions to grow (see Box 2).
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