Introduction The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were agreed upon unanimously in 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly and are due to be achieved by 2030. However, progress has been too slow and incomplete, with recent events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the global economic crisis caused by the Ukraine war further setting back progress, especially in regard to poverty and food security targets. Although thecommon response to this shortfall has been to argue for more international development and climate finance, for policy and institutional reform aimed at monitoring progress towards the SDGs and climate goals, and for innovative ...

Introduction ‘Localisation’ and ‘scale’ – two of the most dominant themes in recent development debates – are born of separate but related frustrations with the legacy and architecture of international development. In localisation’s case, this frustration begins with a rejection of the proposition that the wisdom and legitimacy to shape the destiny of a country, organisation, community or individual can come from the outside. In the case of scaling, the frustration reflects a recognition that donor-funded projects and philanthropy are rarely, if ever, sufficient to produce sustainable development outcomes at scale. Although the constituencies and arguments in support of the ...

Reposted from A concerted push to achieve the SDGs needs a practical scaling approach, 10/5/2023, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-concerted-push-to-achieve-the-sdgs-needs-a-practical-scaling-approach/ To achieve the sustainable development goals (SDGs), we need a concerted push to scale In their recent opinion piece, Shameran Abed and Esther Duflo argue that “[e]xtreme poverty cannot be eradicated by relying on piecemeal development programming limited to the particular whims of different donors. Real progress on the 2030 Agenda requires a massive, concerted push to scale solutions that work.” We could not agree more. But policymakers and development practitioners require more specific guidance to on how such a “concerted push to scale” would ...

Introduction  In 2004, SEWA in Gujarat established the Rural Urban Distribution Initiative (RUDI), one of its most successful enterprises. RUDI integrates the agricultural value chain, connecting local producers with local consumers to generate employment opportunities for women and retain wealth within rural communities. Women process agricultural raw materials at processing centres (PCs) to make pulses and spices, which other women known as RUDIbens promote and sell to consumers.   The promise of the RUDI model led to substantial collaboration for scale and interest in replication in new contexts. In 2014, IMAGO Global Grassroots partnered with SEWA to enhance the sustainability of ...

It’s as if someone suddenly flipped a switch. Discussions about scale and scaling, previously considered esoteric topics, now appear in almost every conversation about ending poverty, saving lives, or protecting the planet. Whether focused on social enterprise or governmental action, social investment or fortunes at the base of the pyramid, these conversations acknowledge the need to confront explicitly the obstacles that stand between successful pilot projects and the solution to population-level problems.As two people who have worked on the issues of scale and scaling for more than a decade , we are pleased at the attention the issue of scale ...

Summary At the Gleneagles Summit in 2005, leaders of the G8 group of nations committed to increase aid to poor nations by $50 billion per year. During the same year, in a meeting in Paris, donors promised to coordinate their interventions for more effective delivery. Th ese commitments are now often referred to as the promise of donors to “scale up aid.” Increasing aid flows and improving coordination are indeed important goals and, in fact, goals that donors seem to have trouble meeting. Th e international donor community met this fall in Accra and will meet in Doha in November ...

Too often, the complex multistakeholder work of scaling is not captured by typical monitoring and evaluation or research studies, and lessons learned are not systematically documented. In response, in 2018 the Center for Universal Education (CUE) at Brookings launched a series of Real-time Scaling Labs (RTSL) to generate more evidence and provide practical recommendations on how to expand, deepen, and sustain the impact of education initiatives leading to transformative change in education systems, especially for the most disadvantaged children and youth. This blog shares findings from a new report, Scaling impact in education for transformative change: Practical recommendations from the ...

Each year an estimated 750 million people have a justice problem that they are unable to solve (1.5 billion people  over 2 years). The Task Force on Justice and the Hague Institute for Innovation of Law have pointed out that if SDG’s promise of ‘equal access to justice for all’ is to be achieved, low-cost models able to respond to unmet justice needs at scale are needed, with hundreds of millions more justice problems solved each year, and economies of scale kicking in. Most recently, a challenge paper from the United Nations Foundation has called for a re-set in the ...

In 2018, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and Sesame Workshop came together to support children’s healthy development by pairing mass media resources with service provision through the Ahlan Simsim initiative. Ahlan Simsim aims to ensure that children ages 0 to 8 affected by conflict and crisis in the MENA region are supported by cost effective, adaptable, and contextualized early childhood development (ECD) solutions that are scaled and sustained for long-term impact. The portfolio of Ahlan Simsim scaling pathways aims to expand and deepen ECD impact and strengthen existing systems to create sustained change in children’s lives, through Contextually-relevant ECD solutions ...

The full article was originally posted on the OECD Development Matters site. Limiting global warming to 1.5°C necessitates radical, quick and large-scale transformations, as echoed throughout the IPCC’s 1.5°C Special Report. The same is true for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. To achieve these transformations, we need disruptive, context-fitting, technological and social innovation, and to create incentives to ensure that once proven effective, innovations are scaled-up. Unfortunately, too many promising innovations fall into the ‘pilot project trap’ and fail to have an impact at the national, regional and global scales ...