Scaling Up the Fight Against Rural Poverty - FIDAfrique

Chapter 1
Introduction: Setting the Stage
IFAD recognizes the need for scaling up successful development interventions. For example, IFAD’s
Strategic Framework for 2007-2010 states that “innovation without scaling-up is of little value” (IFAD
2007a, p. 6), and IFAD’s Innovation Strategy declares that “effective scaling-up is a key measure of
successful innovation” (IFAD 2007b, p. 8). These statements set the stage for the scaling up review of
IFAD presented in this report. They place scaling up at the core of IFAD’s operational strategy. This
review aims to assess whether and how these strategic statements have been translated into operational
practice and what steps IFAD can take to deliver fully on its scaling up mission. IFAD is exceptional
among development assistance agencies for having made the scaling up of successful interventions a
key institutional goal. IFAD can therefore serve as an example for other development partners.
This chapter addresses four questions by way of introduction: Why scale up? Why scaling up for
IFAD? Why a scaling up review for IFAD? How was this scaling up review carried out?
A. Why scaling up?
The international community has set ambitious Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for
sustainable global poverty reduction by 2015. But in mid-2010 it is clear that achieving these targets
will be difficult for most developing countries; many will not be able to do so, especially in Africa.
(IDA 2010a) In the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness international development (donor) partners
and partner (recipient) countries agreed on ways to ensure that development assistance is put to good
use in helping to achieve the MDGs. Interim reviews by OECD-DAC have shown progress, but here
again much remains to be done. Over the first decade of the 2000s development assistance has
increased substantially and the number of development partners has expanded dramatically, but the
ambitious goals for increased aid set at the Glenn Eagles G8 Summit are far from being met. 1
It is in this context of worthy and ambitious development goals, so far not nearly met by the
international community, that we find the rationale for scaling up successful development
interventions, as stated by Hartmann and Linn (2008, p. 2) in their review of the scaling up experience
in development:
“[T]he challenge is not just a matter of more, better coordinated and less volatile aid. A key
constraint that needs to be overcome is that development interventions—projects, programs,
policies—are all too often like small pebbles thrown into a big pond: they are limited in scale,
short-lived, and therefore without lasting impact. This may explain why so many studies have
found that external aid has had only a weak or no development impact in the aggregate at the
global and at the country level, even though many individual interventions have been
successful in terms of their project- or program-specific goals. In order to reduce poverty
substantially, we have to follow the advice of James Wolfensohn and discover ‘how to move
from our feel-good successes to large scale, how to scale up these initiatives to a depth and
breadth where we can really have an impact on poverty, where we can achieve the Millennium
1 For relevant background on trends in development assistance see Kharas (2007), IDA (2010b).
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