I agree strongly with much of what Stella Hughes says, and am especially supportive of the idea that local ownership and capacity-building has to be a cornerstone of any development initiative that does not perpetuate dependency.
In response to the question on what specific critical factors lead to successful scalability, Stella suggests there is not much to go on in the world of ICT. This may be the case but I would point out that there are lessons from other sectors (e.g. military, industry, health care) that might be instructive. For instance, the work done by BRAC in Bangladesh to expand their Oral Therapy Extension Programme (OTEP) - oral rehydration therapy for diarrhea - was a great success that was spread nationwide. Likewise, major bottlers and franchises (e.g. Coke, Heineken, McDonald's) probably have something to teach in this respect. Having looked at a variety of industries, several scientists from my organization - the Institute for Healthcare Improvement - have generalized the following principles of scaling up (which may or may not have relevance to ICT): * You must understand full scale before you start the scale-up work (i.e. what is the growth goal); * Successful scale-up comes when a project or program is expanded in phases of roughly 5x-10x per phase; * It is important to list all of the factors involved in the system to be scaled and then design for maximum leanness in every area; * It is important to be aware of constraint changes as you expand (i.e. which factors scale arithmetically, which scale negatively and which scale positively) * It is important to be aware of the oversight requirements and information systems requirements once full scale is attained; * It is important to be aware of which factors have to be scaled up structurally and which can be scaled up though replication. As for creating a context for successful scale-up, Stella is quite right to point out that a supportive policy environment (political will) and cooperation of donors and NGO's are necessary; to this I would add that successful scale-up also requires: 1. A robust delivery system backbone (e.g. a mechanism for delivering supplies, maintenance) 2. A collaborative methodology and communications network to facilitate exchange of data, innovation and best practices between sites. I know this is somewhat abstract but hope it adds value. This thinking is presently informing our work on scaling up HIV-AIDS treatment in collaboration with WHO, a key part of which will be a communications network to support scale-up (what I am studying in the Reuters Digital Vision Program at Stanford this year.) Best, Joe McCannon ------------------- Institute for Healthcare Improvement Reuters Digital Vision Fellow, Stanford University, 2003-4 617-359-6320 ------------ This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by the dot-ORG USAID Cooperative Agreement, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org provides more information. To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd For the GKD database, with past messages: http://www.GKDknowledge.org
