So, is this the recipe for moving from innovation to testing to scale: Evaluate a program, work with an organization that can scale, replicate in multiple contexts, and scale to improve millions of lives?
That model can work. It was appropriate for the graduation program, which is expensive and thus required a higher burden of evidence of effectiveness before scaling. The graduation program is also very complex implying the results may well vary by implementer, so it is worth testing with several implementers and scaling with those implementers who saw success.
But we shouldn’t conclude that this is the only model for getting to scale. In the rest of this post I will discuss examples of the “innovate, test, scale” approach in which there was no need for replication in multiple contexts; others where the testing was (appropriately) done with a different type of organization than that which scaled it; and finally, examples of evidence impacting millions of lives when it was not a program that was tested, but a theory.
Rachel Glennerster, When do innovation and evidence change lives?
Added to diary 15 January 2018