Box: Scaling-Up: What, How, and Why?

Scaling-up can relate to structures, programs, strategies, and the resource base as follows:

• Quantitative scaling-up (structure). A program or an organization expands its size by increasing its membership base, its geographic area, or its budgets. This occurs when participatory organizations draw increasing numbers of people into their realm.

• Functional scaling-up (programs). A community-based program or a grassroots organization expands the number and the type of its activities. Starting in agricultural production, for example, participatory organizations move into health, nutrition, credit, training, literacy, and so on, when they add new activities to their operational range.

• Political scaling-up (strategy). Participator organizations move beyond service delivery and toward empowerment and change in the structural causes of underdevelopment, that is, its contextual factors and socio-political-economic environment. This will usually involve active political involvement and the development of relationships with the government.

• Organizational scaling-up (the resource base). Community-based programs or grassroots organizations can increase their organizational strength so as to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their activities. They can do so financially by diversifying their sources of support, increasing the degree of self-financing, creating activities that generate income (cooperative enterprises, consultancies), or by assuring the enactment of public legislation earmarking entitlements for the program within annual budgets. They can also do so institutionally by creating external links with other development actors, both public and private, and by improving the internal management capacity of their staff through training or personnel development, which will allow the organization and its programs to grow, be flexible, and be sustainable.

Abstracted from Peter Uvin and David Miller, "Scaling Up: Thinking through the Issues," World Hunger Program Research Report 1994-1, available on: http://www.brown. edu/Departments/World_Hunger_Program/hungerweb/WHP/SCALINGU_ToC.html.