Scaling Up Programmes

We work to scale up appropriate programmes while ensuring their quality and sustainability.

In determining whether to scale up programmes, we need to ensure that decisions to do so:

  • are informed by evidence, including epidemiological, social and behavioural research and programme evaluation findings
  • involve PLHIV and affected communities in participatory assessment to determine unmet need
  • are informed by an assessment of the overall response by the range of organisations and institutions within the particular context, including NGOs and public and private sector agencies, to identify unmet need
  • determine which of the strategies for scaling up is most appropriate in the given context, such as whether we are best placed ourselves to address the unmet need, or whether efforts should be directed to advocating for or supporting other organisations or institutions to do so
  • build on our particular expertise, strengths and experience, and
  • are informed by our ability to acquire the necessary financial and human resources and technical support needed to scale up.

When planning scaling-up strategies, we need to ensure their quality and sustainability by:

  • assessing and responding to the implications of scaling up for our organisation
  • building organisational capacity, securing the necessary financial resources and a supportive social and political environment to sustain the programme over time
  • building on the strengths of community initiatives and fostering community ownership of programmes as they are brought to scale
  • developing approaches that are sufficiently flexible to address the diversity of need among vulnerable populations, as informed by evidence
  • determining an appropriate pace of change, given organisational capacity, level of community mobilisation and time needed to implement scaling up strategies, and
  • establishing mechanisms for the collection and analysis of data to enable evaluation of the quality, sustainability and impact of programmes brought to scale.

Supporting NGOs need to assist their partner NGOs in scaling up by:

  • developing and using transparent criteria for identifying partner NGOs capable of scaling up programmes
  • ensuring clarity about, and agreement on, the nature of the scaling up envisaged at the outset
  • investing time and money in building capacity to support the scaling up
  • allowing and encouraging NGOs to diversify their sources of support
  • acknowledging and negotiating tensions among multilateral, government, NGO and donor goals, objectives and strategies for scaling up to ensure that the process of gaining support for scaling up does not undermine the independence of NGOs, and
  • actively promoting scaling up as a vital aspect of the global response to HIV and facilitating the exchange of information about it among local, national and international stakeholders.